Musk has emerged as a fervent supporter of Alternative for Germany, a far-right, anti-immigrant party that is polling in second place ahead of Germany's parliamentary election.

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.

The margin of error for individual polls is estimated from the poll’s sample size and the number of eligible German voters reported by the German Federal Statistical Office.

German politicians made a final scramble for votes Saturday on the eve of key elections in which conservatives hope to win despite the dramatic rise of the far right targeting