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, the first ever candidate of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party for the post of Chancellar, lives with her partner and two children in Switzerland.

As Germany heads to the polls, a look at the politician cultivating the anti-immigrant party’s ‘image of competence’.