The leading candidate, Friedrich Merz, a conservative who has adopted many of the AfD’s hard-line positions on immigration, used his closing statement of the debate to promise his voters that he would never allow the AfD into his government. Under him, he said, the firewall would hold.

Alice Weidel, missed a late-night congratulatory call from American billionaire Elon Musk following her party's success in the Bundestag elections. When she checked her phone in the morning, she saw "missed calls in the night from the United States.

Germany’s federal elections took place this weekend, with the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) winning overall and set to form a coalition government.