Election advertising is a world of its own. There are good and bad spots and those that are just completely off the mark. And with some one would like to hunch over with foreign shame. Time to look back just before the end of the campaign.
“My father was a miner,” says Armin Laschet and he has us hooked in the CDU’s election commercial. We already know that he has to be down to earth, that the friendly-looking Rhinelander knows what life is like. Because as Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Laschet closed the last mine in the land of the winding towers, as he continues. And everything would be wonderful if it weren’t for this little inconsistency: Laschet is shown walking underground in a white miner’s suit through a tunnel. With a coal-smeared face – the only one. Everyone around him still has very clean faces. Was there any cheating?
Welcome to the world of election advertising. In the election campaign that has now ended, there was a lot on offer – not just from Laschet. Time to look back! Let’s stay with the CDU candidate. On social media, some criticized the fact that Laschet can be seen in the spot for a few seconds at the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Were the steles misused as a backdrop? Can you do that? However, the pictures came from an appointment between the CDU boss and Josef Schuster from the Central Council of Jews – so it was not shot especially for the commercial. The Central Council then defended Laschet against the rising indignation.
It wasn’t the only excitement this campaign season. The question is always: Who is actually getting upset? And: is that really bad? The SPD experienced a case of: “Only the competition gets upset”. Keyword: Matryoshka. One of the Russian wooden dolls with Laschet’s face was shown in a very original film. Off-screen: “Whoever votes for Armin Laschet and the CDU is choosing a policy that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer.” Meanwhile you can see how one hand takes off the outermost matryoshka and the next comes to light: With the face of Friedrich Merz. Then comes the highly controversial CDU right winger Hans-Georg Maaßen, then NRW State Chancellor Nathanael Liminski.
(Not) a beautiful country
This promptly upset the “Bild” newspaper, which wrote of a “repulsive dirty campaign” and assumed that the SPD “apparently” had more problems with Catholics than with Islamists. Because Liminski, Laschet’s right-hand man in North Rhine-Westphalia, a very conservative Catholic and CDU man, had said in recent years that he did not want to have sex before marriage and that he felt sorry for some homosexuals. In the meantime, however, he has put these statements into perspective. The SPD vowed not to show the badly polemical spot, which was not planned anyway. The CDU has now returned the favor with a similarly made spot.
Well, and then there was the almost legendary spot by the Greens, which will probably be remembered for years to come. In it, people sing a version of the folk song “No beautiful country” with a new text (“A beautiful country”), which reproduces the green election manifesto. A verb for this has spilled over to Germany from the American language, which has been used several times: to cringe. That describes the facial expression that appears when “oh yeah” is rhymed with “education and wages finally fair”.
The spot is extremely interesting. Just the fact that an old folk song was used here – from the Greens! Folk songs have always been the domain of country women, men’s choirs and perhaps old miners’ choirs. One would have expected something like rap from the Greens. Whereby, something like that can end badly. The fact that the Greens started the old tune shows that they now want to address everyone, including the old, including the supposed CDU voters. This is more than a short-term vote-catching strategy – it is an expression of the growing up of the Greens, of arriving in the middle of society.
What is also interesting about the spot is that the people in it don’t just serve as a backdrop for the candidates. In other advertising films, such as the one by Laschet or one by Franziska Giffey for the election in Berlin, which is also taking place on Sunday, you see the candidates together with other people, but they don’t do much. In the green commercial, on the other hand, they are in the foreground, are shown in close-up and actively sing. The message: It’s about you and: We are only two of many.
“We” mean Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck, who are faded in at the end and still say “Now give everything” (Habeck) and “Live the start” (Baerbock) (do not sing). Habeck in particular smiles mischievously. Of course he knew, did they know with the Greens, that such a spot would attract attention. And isn’t that the real goal? It is always said: “There is no such thing as bad PR”. Or to paraphrase Salvador Dalí: “If you want to interest you have to provoke.” In any case, it is not quite so clear that this spot was really a fiasco – despite the cringe factor.
CDU video with a lateral thinker
The CDU has only just come under fire because it has also shown courage – but there are divided opinions about whether that was a good thing. A new short clip shows the scene from the first week of September in which a man walks up to Laschet at an election campaign event past security and asks a question. It is now known that the man is one of the “lateral thinkers”.
The fact that he of all people now appears in an official election campaign video castigates the left as “courting” corona deniers. Especially since, as it was said in the Berlin daily newspaper, the man also maintains contacts with neo-Nazis. For the party, on the other hand, this is an example of speaking to those who have a “critical attitude”. It can be assumed that the CDU is referring to people who have this critical attitude towards the Corona measures – and not right-wing extremists who have a critical attitude towards democracy. Here too: controversy with an announcement and the realization that it has penetrated. But was it still wise?
Some commercials, on the other hand, only encourage smiles. Approximately that of the AfD for the state election campaign in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. There the right-wing populists spread their slogan “But normal”. Germany should become “normal” again, they say in it – which by the way excludes everyone who is not “normal”. And who actually determines what is normal? Does “normal” really mean “German”? One can worry about what will be done with such formulations. But at the end of the commercial there is a song in which the candidate only moves his lips while a woman’s voice sings “But normal”. If the AfD thinks it’s normal for men to sing with women’s voices, you can almost be happy about the spot.