Friedrich Merz, head of the Christian Democrats (CDU), is currently tipped to replace Social Democrat Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose term the conservatives have slammed as "three lost years" over the stuttering economy.
A day after Scholz lost a parliamentary confidence vote he called to pave the way for the early elections, Merz claimed that the chancellor had "lost the confidence of a majority of the population a long time ago".
Merz - a rival of his party's more moderate ex-chancellor Angela Merkel - has vowed to orchestrate a return to the CDU's right-wing roots as he competes against the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
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In their campaign programme published Tuesday, the CDU and its Bavarian allies the CSU vowed to "stop illegal migration" and scale down benefits for rejected asylum seekers to a "bed, bread and soap" minimum.
They also pledged "zero tolerance" on crime, more video surveillance in public spaces and to "shut down mosques where hate and anti-Semitism is being preached".
To revive Europe's largest economy, which is expected to shrink for the second year in a row, the conservatives want to slash unemployment benefits and make "hard work worth it again".
Much of the platform may be softened in the coalition talks that typically follow German elections, but for now the alliance vowed to reverse two decades of more centrist rule dating back to the Merkel years.
They promised a "fundamental shift in migration policy" and criticised Merkel's welcome to refugees, without naming her, by declaring that "we also made mistakes in government - and learnt from them".
The alliance also said it would reverse the legalisation of marijuana enacted by Scholz's three-party alliance with the Greens and the liberal FDP, which collapsed in early November.
The CDU also said it opposed efforts to liberalise abortion rules, a new gender self-determination law, and a modern linguistic convention often dubbed "gendering" designed to make the German language more inclusive.
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Speaking at a joint press conference with Merz, CSU leader Markus Söder summed up their position as firmly middle-class and conservative and "definitely not left-wing and not woke and not gendered".
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