'It's scary' Germans fear far-right future as vote looms

Flanked by market stalls selling everything from Turkish börek pastries to bejewelled iPhone cases, Lina, 53, confessed that she was racked with worry about what may lie ahead for her three children once Sunday's election is over.

- Ashifa Kassam

She has lived in Germany for decades, carving out a life for herself and her family after moving from Lebanon. Now - after a frenzied election campaign in which most politicians have scrambled to ward off the rise of the far right with tough talk on migrants - she wondered what the consequences would be for the lives they had painstakingly built.

"It's scary," she said. Worse still, the torrent of anti-migrant rhetoric had seemingly done little to stem the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD), with polls suggesting it is poised to vault into an unprecedented second place.

"They are against Islam, against Arabs," she added. "Who knows if they will bring in laws against us? It's really upsetting."

Her words were a hint of the high stakes that are at play as Germany heads to the ballot box. Migration has loomed large in the lead-up to the vote, cast repeatedly as a problem to be solved, from Olaf Scholz's promise to "deport people more often and faster" to the proposals by the conservative opposition leader, Friedrich Merz, to turn away asylum seekers at Germany's borders and revoke the citizenship of dual nationals who commit a crime.

Both have seemingly sought to keep pace with the far-right AfD, which has peddled promises of remigration and repeatedly tied migrants to crime, falsely tarring the millions of Germans who hail from around the world and who live peacefully and contribute to the country.

"It's the first time, I would say, that I really feel like a foreigner in my own country," said Cihan Sinanoğlu, a social scientist who works with the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research. "Racialised people and groups understand that the whole debate about migration is also a debate about us, about what it means to be German and who's in and who's out."