Battle chants sound like in the football stadium, the slogan “hiiieeer reeegiert…” – usually the name of the club comes here, which the supporters chant. “Hiiieeer reeegiert the SPD” can be heard on Tuesday in the film theater at Sendlinger Tor. The Social Democrats have invited to the traditional Munich cinema to present their campaign for the last weeks of the election campaign. The football slogan is part of a commercial.
In this case, however, governing does not mean the Bavarian State Chancellery, in which Markus Söder sits and has not been a comrade since Wilhelm Hoegner more than six decades ago. But it’s about the 200 SPD-led town halls in cities and communities. She now wants to throw the party into the balance as a pound in the election campaign. On the screen you can see all sorts of place-name signs: Munich, logically, but also Steinberg am See in the Schwandorf district or Vilgertshofen near Landsberg am Lech.
There are still a good two months until the state elections, the SPD only posts around ten percent in surveys, recently in a Forsa survey for the Southgerman newspaper it was nine. Top candidate Florian von Brunn took up the position of head of state with the promise of a “trend reversal”. It is necessary to make up for the historic debacle of 2018, 9.7 percent. Brunn exudes optimism on Tuesday. He believes that there will still be “significant gains”. In the 2021 federal election, from which Olaf Scholz emerged as chancellor, the SPD was by no means in a good position a few months earlier. Incidentally, the same agency as then is now responsible for the election campaign for the Free State.
The aim is to convey to the voters that the SPD can take responsibility because it already governs Bavaria – namely in numerous town halls, “with seriousness and competence,” explains SPD state chairwoman Ronja Endres. That affects “almost four million people in all parts of Bavaria”. The content of the campaign focuses on housing and an “affordable Bavaria” as well as care, education and renewable energies. A program worked out with the people on site, says Brunn, “not just any calendar sayings, not just any chichi”. The SPD also recently presented a five-point plan for the Bavarian economy.
And then there’s the campaign itself, which is heavily tailored to Florian von Brunn as a person. In the future, for example, a poster line is planned that will depict addressees of social democratic politics with him; namely one half of the face of the top candidate and, for example, a child or a pensioner. Will the tactic work in light of Brunn’s meager notoriety? He is known to a third of the people in Bavaria, Brunn claims, that is “not so little. And that will now go up very strongly through the election campaign”.