The district of Munich comprises 29 cities and municipalities, all of which belong to the constituency 221, Munich-Land. Bernhard Senft, 25, is running as a direct candidate for “The Party”. The “smallest party”, as he himself calls it, has to put up the election posters with a budget of 1000 euros. “There are six or seven of us,” he says. The pasting of the posters is distributed among these people.
To do this, however, they need to know where and how they are allowed to put up the likeness of the 25-year-old in the respective location. In order to receive the respective and often very different billposting regulations, each individual public order office must first be written to. “The annoying thing is then my poor e-mail mailbox,” says Senft. Because it is full of 29 regulations. These have to be read first and when the municipalities and cities are divided up among the six poster stickers, the appropriate e-mails have to be forwarded to the right people. A mundane but time-consuming activity.
Nobody can remember all the small differences, so you have to go with your notes or your smartphone to have all the rules with you. Another problem is that not all information always arrives on time. “I hadn’t received an occupancy plan for your billboard from Aschheim, so we just checked in at the top left,” says Senft. In Taufkirchen, the occupancy of the current billboard is based on the results of the last federal election, according to Senft. “There is no more space for us, because only eight parties fit on the small wall.” However, it would have been allowed to set up a poster stand next to it.
In any case, it is impossible for the small team and the small budget to post posters in all municipalities – and not in all places either. For example, Graefelfing had 44 billboards, which could not be achieved. “We ran out of paste.” In Grünwald, on the other hand, there are only twelve. “We absolutely had to go there,” says Senft with the party’s own satire. “There are a lot of rich people there, we have to scare them.” In Aying, the ordinance states that only reusable materials may be used. However, this is not a problem for Senft and his team, because they cannot afford the hollow-wall posters made of plastic anyway. According to Senft, Ottobrunn has the fewest regulations. “This is the wild west,” he says.
Katinka Burz, a direct candidate for the Left, finds the many different regulations difficult as a self-poster with a small team. A helper did her job to collect all the regulations. Burz has a suggestion for improvement for the next elections: All billposting regulations should be collected on a website. In Feldkirchen, for example, ten places are listed on street corners, in Brunnthal there are only two boards. If there is no information about the exact place to be removed, she does it like this: “I always stick on the left.”