CDU election campaign: pictures, pictures and a few questions

The CDU wants to present Chancellor candidate Laschet with a strong team in its election campaign. For the first time, the party is therefore advertising with people and not just with slogans. But not everything is what it seems.

The CDU remains true to its themes: Maintaining prosperity, internal security, protecting the climate and at the same time creating jobs, strengthening the family, ensuring that children “learn today what matters tomorrow”, affordable housing, a good life in old age – not big ones So surprises.

The leitmotif or the “black thread” of the campaign, as CDU General Secretary Paul Ziemiak calls it, is the so-called Unionkreis – a form that can be found on all election campaign materials and, according to Ziemiak, is intended to demonstrate solidarity. Because the CDU is not the party of “either / or”, but the party of “both / and”. You could also say the square of the thread.

Faces instead of slogans

The party is breaking new ground with the presentation: people instead of slogans adorn the posters and for the first time ever. “We show faces and we focus on topics,” declared Ziemiak proudly when he presented the campaign in the Konrad-Adenauer-Haus.

These faces are male, female, they are not diverse, but white. The family is the traditional nuclear family made up of mother, father and child – although Ziemiak mentions alternative family designs in his presentation, they are not shown. A nurse bends lovingly over grandpa and there are even posters with an engineer with a hard hat and a policewoman – they show women in jobs that were traditionally more male.

More appearance than reality?

But at least two of the women on the posters have other jobs than those shown – they work for the CDU. The alleged nurse is one of the party’s spokespersons, the policewoman with a bulletproof vest is one of the leading employees in the CDU online campaign “Connect”.

Ziemiak anticipated this in his presentation without going into too much detail and justified it with the fact that the CDU did not want to keep a nurse, police officer or geriatric nurse from work in the pandemic to take photos for election advertising and also one Want to produce a “responsible” and safe campaign.

It may be responsible, but is it also authentic? How close is a party to people who disguise members and employees as representatives of professional groups? How credible is a promotional video that shows the Union Chancellor candidate Laschet as a merger of citizen actors?

The limits of what is possible together

Those who had hoped to spot some of Laschet’s campaign team among all the faces, in addition to the “Chancellor candidate motif” (a somewhat tense-looking Laschet), were disappointed. Since, however, because of the expected historically high proportion of postal voters, “every day is election day” for the CDU, according to Ziemiak, the CDU would also make the “entire breadth” clear with people and faces in the course of the summer.

However, nobody should expect a poster motif: Armin Laschet side by side with the former President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maaßen. Such a poster was “unthinkable”, explained Ziemiak when asked, a further signal of the demarcation of Maaßen, who is applying for a direct mandate for the CDU in a constituency in southern Thuringia and with his regular provocations increasingly criticized, also from his own party draws itself.

Avoid unpleasant pictures

In order to prevent unpleasant images, the party is breaking with another tradition, because posters that show direct candidates together with the candidate for chancellor or, as is now the case with the candidate, are standard.

Incidentally, Laschet himself was not present when the campaign was presented, which is also his campaign. This is traditionally a matter for the Secretary General, said Ziemiak, while he presented on his own how the CDU wants to “do Germany together”. Laschet was definitely in Berlin: he sat next to Queen Máxima at the reception of the Dutch royals in the Federal Council.