How Germany's Political scenario became boring after Angela Merkel.

GERMAN ELECTIONS 2017 – HOW ANGELA MERKEL WON HER FOURTH TERM AS THE GERMAN CHANCELLOR

Much of the Angela Merkel government’s re-election strategy rests in Merkel's political appeal as a leader who will stand up to the rough men of the world in difficult times: Donald Trump in the United States, Vladimir Putin in Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. 

Merkel’s mellow campaign strategy: Avoid confrontation

‘Germans want to be left in peace,’ says one conservative official. ‘They don’t want to debate things.’ To understand Angela Merkel’s campaign strategy, look no further than the posters her party splashed all over Germany.

“Enjoy the summer now, and make the right choice in the fall,” one of them tells voters, depicting a dreamy young woman in a meadow.

After the conservative chancellor’s third term was getting close to an end her main goal was to ensure the final stretch of the campaign up to the September 24 election remained low-key. Or, as one official from her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) put it: “If everything stays the way it is right now, any move is a move too many.”

With six weeks to go before Germany votes for a new parliament, Merkel’s conservatives were comfortably polling over 40 percent. Her main rival, former European Parliament President Martin Schulz has little to show for the three weeks he spent on the campaign trail while Merkel was enjoying a hike in the Italian Alps. Despite rushing from retirement homes to factories, Schulz’s Social Democrats (SPD) continued to poll below 25 percent, more than 15 percentage points behind Merkel.

“The race for No. 1 is over,” Christian Lindner, party chief of the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), a potential coalition partner for the conservatives, said a month before the election results, echoing widespread opinion among commentators and pollsters.

“Germans want to be left in peace. It’s finally summer, they’re slowly coming back from holidays, everyone has a job and there are barely any refugees visible anymore. They don’t want to debate things” h e said.

Merkel’s strategy, which has helped the long-time chancellor get re-elected twice already, is to avoid confrontation, safe in the knowledge that her supporters will cast their votes for her conservatives whether she campaigns or not, unlike other parties’ voters who need to be mobilized.

The CDU believes their relatively prosperous electorate responds better to specific promises like creating full employment by 2025 or cutting income taxes than to Schulz’s attempts to provoke heated campaign debates.

Merkel's laid-back campaign goes horizontal: "enjoy the summer vote the right way in the autumn"

The refugee factor

There wasn’t much that could have gone wrong, conservative party officials mentioned — with only a few exceptions.

On top of that list: migration.

Merkel’s CDU were polling above 40 percent with the election within a month away.

Two years ago, an unexpected influx of asylum seekers arriving in Europe via the Greek islands threw Merkel into the worst crisis since she took office in 2005. Since then, the number of arrivals in Greece has dropped significantly, but more asylum seekers have begun to arrive via the central Mediterranean route from Libya in Italy.

Last month, Schulz sounded the alarm that a new refugee crisis could be looming. It was widely understood as an attempt to draw Merkel out of her shell, reminding voters of her handling of the 2015 refugee crisis, when she decided to temporarily open the country’s borders for migrants stranded in Hungary.

However, Schulz’s tactic backfired when the media focused more on a flawed number he quoted than the argument he was trying to make, and Merkel was able to ignore the entire episode.

At the same time, well aware that a new increase of asylum seekers making their way to Germany could pose a threat to her campaign, Merkel’s team is eager to send out the message that the chancellor is watching closely what’s happening in Italy.

One of Merkel’s first appointments when she came back from her holiday was the lunch with the chiefs of the United Nations’ refugee agency UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration to discuss the situation which was followed by a joint press conference.

On the campaign trail

One day later, Merkel kicked off a six-week series of campaign appearances across Germany.

CDU officials said that the chancellor wanted to be seen on the campaign trail to send out the signal that despite her lead in polls, she wasn’t taking an election victory for granted — but at the same time, she will avoid confrontation wherever possible.

The next Wednesday, for example, Merkel gave an online interview to four German YouTube celebrities.

Two years ago, when another YouTube blogger interviewed Merkel, it was the chancellor who essentially ended up running the conversation while dodging critical questions. This time too, it seemed that the four young interviewees — among them a beauty expert and a tech blogger — didn’t succeed in bringing the experienced chancellor out of her shell.

So far, there seemed to be mainly two occasions that could have turned out to become difficult for her, officials believed.

One of them was a televised “town hall meeting” later in August, during which the chancellor had to react directly to questions from the audience.

The other one was a major debate in early September when Merkel faced Schulz head-to-head on live TV.

Martin Schulz has been floundering in his bid to usurp Merkel

The real challenge

However, the most interesting fight, according to one CDU official in the Bundestag, didn’t happen until after the election, when Germany’s political parties — after having pulled each other apart for weeks — sat down for coalition talks to try to form a governing majority.

Such sentiments suggested the CDU considered it was virtually impossible for Merkel to be unseated by Schulz. With more than six weeks left until the vote, history suggested this was premature.

“In all those years … has there ever been anyone who made Angela Merkel dance the tango?” — CDU official laughing at Martin Schulz’s chance of turning things around.

Back in 2005, at around this point in the campaign, then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was also lagging around 15 percentage points behind Merkel, who was opposition leader at the time.

During the last weeks ahead of the vote, however, he managed to catch up. On Election Day, Merkel only won by a wafer-thin margin.

When asked whether Schulz has a better chance of sparking a real debate and catching up in the polls now that Merkel is back from her vacation, as it takes two to tango, the CDU official burst out into laughter.

“In all those years … has there ever been anyone who made Angela Merkel dance the tango?”

Angela Merkel’s CDU election manifesto

German Chancellor Angela Merkel promised tax cuts and a dramatic reduction in unemployment as her re-election campaign finally got into gear. Her SPD opponent Martin Schulz called the manifesto faint-hearted.

Merkel presented the plan at a press conference at party headquarters in Berlin on Monday alongside Horst Seehofer, leader of her Bavarian allies the Christian Social Union (CSU), saying, "Our future program for Germany is: prosperity and security for all." 
CSU General Secretary, Andreas Scheuer, posted a tweet as the event got underway: "Together for our country. Today we seal the government program of the CDU and CSU," he wrote:
Help for the affluent middle
The CDU's election plan included:
- Lowering national unemployment to below 3 percent by 2025, which would mean nearly half the current rate of 5.5 percent, or 2.5 million people. Opposition parties have persistently argued that these figures hide the true numbers, since millions of people working so-called mini-jobs are still dependent on state benefits.
- Tax cuts which would include raising the top income tax bracket to 60,000 euros a year, rather than the current 52,000 euros. This is a considerably more modest increase than the proposal by Merkel's main rivals, the Social Democrats (SPD), who would raise the top income tax bracket to 76,000 euros - and raise the top rate itself from 42 percent to 45 percent. The CDU only want to tax the "super-rich" (single people earning over 232,000 euros) the 45-percent rate. 
- Phasing out the "solidarity fee" for the former East Germany beginning in 2020. This extra tax, imposed in the wake of reunification specifically to boost the economy in the "new states" in eastern Germany, has long rankled taxpayers' rights groups. Like the SPD, the CDU has now promised to phase it out - though it remains unclear exactly when it will disappear completely. On Monday, the CDU did not repeat a previous promise to phase it out by 2030.
- Increase in child allowance. Child allowance will be raised from the current level of 192 euros to 217 euros per month. On top of this, the CDU wants to raise the tax abatement for dependent children from 7,356 euros to 8,820 euros.
- Help for first-time property buyers. Families buying property for the first time are to receive an extra state benefit of 1,200 euros per year per child.
- An extra 15,000 police officers to be hired across Germany, including both state and federal police forces.
- Partial dual nationality concessions. Another issue that has dogged the conservative wing of the CDU will be resolved with a compromise: First-generation migrants and their children will be allowed to hold two passports - but following generations will have to choose a nationality.

Opponents unimpressed                                 

The tax plans were heavily criticized by the SPD, currently the junior partner in Merkel's government coalition, whose party chairwoman Katarina Barley told the Rheinische Post newspaper, "The CDU is only following the watering can model in its family policies, which always only help the high-income earners. The gap between rich and poor will widen further and further."Likewise, the plan to raise the children's allowance was denounced as bribery: "If the CDU had a real interest in a significant raise in a children's allowance, there would have been a chance to do it in this legislative period."

In a similar vein, the current German minister for construction, Barbara Hendricks, also of the SPD, was quick to criticize the CDU's plan to offer first-time buyers extra money, since it "would not reach those who really need help with buying an apartment."

Hendricks claims that her own plan, which she was unable to get past the CDU during her tenure, would reach poorer people and be much more effective: It would see families with one child be given 8,000 euros to buy or invest in the building of a new home. Families with two or three children would also receive an additional 6,000 euros per child.

Merkel's biggest rival, Martin Schulz of the SPD, criticized the manifesto as superficial. "This is a faint-hearted program, without ideas for the future," he said in a statement. "It's a program that is not serious, unjust, and irresponsible."

Meanwhile, the socialist Left party, the biggest opposition party in the current parliament, had even harsher words for conservative plan. "This Merkel agenda was cobbled together in the backrooms of the Adenauer house [the CDU party HQ] without any internal party debate, much less a public debate," Left party leader Katja Kipping said in a statement posted on Facebook. "This is a program of blank spaces. The CDU and CSU simply duck issues like pensions, fighting poverty, and public infrastructure."

Kipping also suggested that the CDU's promises weren't even backed by a proper finance plan: "A good economy and the phase of low interest rates won't cover all the things that are being promised," she said.

Still no migration cap

Many German commentators were keen to see whether the most obvious friction point between Merkel and her noticeably more conservative Bavarian ally, Horst Seehofer, would be mentioned in the manifesto. This was the much discussed migration cap, which Seehofer's party, the CSU, has demanded since Germany was plunged into a bureaucratic crisis after an influx of refugees in late 2015.

Merkel and Seehofer were keen to demonstrate their new unity, and had reached a sort of compromise - though one that favored Merkel. While the cap was not present in the manifesto, the chancellor promised that the CDU would pursue a law ensuring that skilled workers would be favored.

Both leaders were keen to deflect attention from their past differences: Merkel emphasized that there would be "no repeat" of the refugee crisis that had led to the strife; while Seehofer said there had not been "a breath of difference on any point" as they drew up the manifesto.

Meanwhile, the migration cap itself was included in a separate Bavarian plan drawn up by the CSU alone, and Seehofer said that, given the drop in the number of people seeking asylum in Germany, the cap would "not play a legal role this year." 

The CDU was hovering at around 40 percent in some opinion polls, while its closest rivals, the SPD,  was struggling at around 25 percent. A brief surge in popularity for SPD candidate Martin Schulz had the two parties neck and neck earlier in the year, but that has dissipated.

How all-powerful Angela Merkel swallowed up the left

SPD faces threat of collapse after four years as Ms Merkel's junior coalition partner. Now its supporters say her domination of German politics represents a threat to the country's democracy.

Lagging in the polls with around 22 per cent of voting intentions, far behind Ms Merkel’s conservative CDU which is stable at around 37 per cent, the SPD, led by former EU Parliament President Martin Schulz, is soul-searching.

Embittered SPD voters are even jumping ship as Ms Merkel has moved further and further into the centre ground throughout her time in office. “Merkel’s politic has followed public opinion, which means there has been neither competing ideas nor real debate. This is posing a threat to our democracy. After we joined the grand coalition, people could no longer see the differences between us and the CDU. People are looking for an alternative but cannot find one,” Martin Hikel, the chairman of the SPD branch in Neukölln said.

About a third of German voters admitted in a poll last week they remained undecided about whom to vote for days before the election, making the nature of the future coalition government the key question ahead of the vote. 

 “On the one side, Ms Merkel provided a safe cushion for Germany for 12 years ..., but on the other, it created huge boredom and political apathy with politicians losing the sense of how challenging and competing politics can be. This has been a good strategy for Merkel because she is almost singing the country asleep,” said Stefan Kornelius, head of foreign affairs at the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Despite the status quo, Mr. Kornelius added there had been “a tectonic shift” of the German political landscape towards the centre-right with a huge number of volatile voters moving between parties.

The revival of the pro-business, neo-liberal National Democratic Party (FPD) and the rise of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD), which lured voters who believed the CDU no longer stood for their conservative values, have seen the proportion of right-wing voters on the rise.

In the coalition government, the SPD pushed its social policies onto the agenda with the Government passing laws on a minimum wage and closing Germany’s gender pay gap – but it was Ms Merkel who took the credit. 

Younger SPD voters are unimpressed with their party’s performance since entering the coalition. A member of the SPD’s youth organization “Jusos”, Tim Lange, 17, said a majority of young people in the party hoped to see it bounce back by returning to its left-wing tradition.

Back in Neukölln, Mr. Hinkel believes the SPD’s salvation lies in building on trust from grassroots communities and creating a new social democratic narrative with a European vision, carried by Mr. Schulz, at its core.   

But even with Mr. Schulz’s EU experience, the party will have to overshadow Ms Merkel’s own legacy in Europe.

The impact of Ms Merkel on the EU has been “huge and underestimated”, said Mr. Kornelius. From the threat of collapse of the eurozone to pressures from Russia and her handling of the refugee crisis, Mr. Kornelius said Ms Merkel had been able “to close the ranks, keep Europe together and prevent it from slipping apart” and that she intended to do the same with Brexit.

But despite her strong performance on the world stage, Ms Merkel will have to watch the mood of the people in Germany. “If people start believing they are paying too high a price to accommodate EU wishes, then there is the risk of a strong anti-European backlash,” said Mr. Kornelius.

Ms Merkel’s anticipated win in September 2017 election is bound to be her last term in office and could see the end of an extended period of drowsiness in German politics. With the future after 2021 so unpredictable, the next four years are likely to be used to prepare the ground for a new era of electoral battles in Germany.

More eggshell, or: 4 things Angela Merkel can teach you about PR (and winning elections)

Last September, Angela Merkel won the German elections with more than 41 % of the vote - the best result of the CDU in 20 years, as well as her ticket to a historical third term as chancellor. 

The creative mastermind behind her campaign was Lutz Meyer's agency Blumberry, and he was recently in Brussels to discuss how he had positioned the "Angela Merkel brand" for the elections, and to give some advice about political campaigning in general. Also, it happened to be the maiden event for STIMA's "Political Marketing" group, a great new initiative headed by Lode Soenen.

1. More eggshell

“Left parties want to debate issues all the time,” said Meyer provocatively. “But I don’t believe in that style of campaigning. Don’t we live in a democracy because we want to delegate all these issues to the professional politicians?”
Debating issues can also be quite risky, he said.
“Look at the greens: they polled at 30 percent before the campaign. But when they started to campaign, they insisted on the fact that they wanted to raise taxes, here there and everywhere. We have to raise taxes on people with average income, the greens said, because we need to pay back our debt. After which they dropped to about 7 percent in the polls and they had to change their strategy. People said: no, this isn’t the green party that I had in mind. I like their talk about ecology and justice, but I don’t like taxes. So they had to change the campaign ten days before the elections. That’s a real problem.”
What elections are really about, Meyer said, is trust. Hence the importance of...eggshell.
“I don’t believe that political campaigns are educational seminars. People don’t want to get hammered with messages. They watch tv for four years, they already have formed a personal impression about all the issues. So what you do is: present the parties nice, and in a way that is not strange.”

For Merkel, the choice was made for a color palette with a lot of eggshell (“when we presented it to the campaign, we called it écru because it sounds nicer than eggshell”, quipped Meyer).

The campaign created two sets of pictures: one with happy, smiling average Germans.

1. Smiling, happy Germans:

The other with the CDU party faces, with a similar feel to them – sitting relaxed, in soft light, in an IKEA-like interior. They are sitting in a sofa, reading a paper, being likable and warm. “This idea that an election poster needs to show only the eyes, mouth and the ears, is all wrong in my opinion”, said Meyer.

2. Something new (anything, really)

Every campaign needs ‘something new’, said Meyer. It doesn’t even matter much what it is, as long as it’s new. In Merkel’s case, the campaign built an app.
Whereas marketers in the past worked with QR codes, new technology allows any picture to serve as a QR code and become interactive. The Angela Merkel app allows voters to point their camera at a Merkel poster, and image recognition automatically starts a video of Merkel, speaking directly to the voter.

We tried it ourselves during the lecture – it’s a bit startling to have Merkel talk directly to you. It also works quite nicely – thanks to image recognition, “video Merkel” stays superimposed over the “poster Merkel”, even when you move your phone around.
Is this a gimmick? Absolutely. The app has received 57 votes in total. I wanted to find out how many times it was downloaded, and StackOverflow suggests that an app might be downloaded about 100 times the number of votes or reviews it received. This is confirmed by xyo.net, which puts the number of downloads on iOS (iPhone) at something like 7000. It’s safe to say that the app is a branding exercise rather than a way to swing the electorate.
But if the app cost € 20k to develop and generated a ton of generally positive or at least neutral articles in political and tech media (where the young voters are), then what's the problem? 

The lesson of the app goes beyond politics. Any campaign for any brand can use a touch of new to make it more interesting, to raise questions and conversation.
You can argue that this is a “trick”, and that's partly right. 
In 2007, brands announced that they would start using social media – and they got coverage with it, and a lot of free buzz by marketing people. Just recently, we read about a fast food place that started to accept Bitcoin, which resulted in a lot of buzz. Is that a bad thing? Is that “all buzz and no substance”? Maybe. But maybe it also shows that, despite the serious business you’re involved in (politics, food, whatever), you haven’t lost your playfulness and curiosity. Or even, that you have a faint idea of what is going on in the world - in other words, that you are somehow relevant. 

3. A symbol (and SCALE)

“Every campaign needs a symbol,” said Meyer. In Merkel’s case, the campaign focused on how Merkel brings her hands together in front of her. The question was: how to elevate her peculiar “Mr. Burns”-like posture to symbolic heights?

For this, the campaign turned to crowdsourcing. On the Facebook page (with almost 500 000 fans, by the way), the campaign asked people to send in a photo of someone holding their hands like Merkel. “It took a lot of double and triple checking to make sure that no unsavory people like Hitler or Mussolini couldn’t make it through,” said Meyer. 

Angela "The Joker" Merkel

When they had amassed a few thousand of these pictures, they assembled them into a gigantic mural on the CDU party headquarters in Berlin – a stunning visual that attracted attention around the world.
After that, the campaign managed to go viral:
This is the beauty of scale, I think. There is something catchy about doing something on a ridiculous scale, requiring wasteful amounts of human energy and devotion. There is no rational explanation for it. I suspect that it has to do with the utter conviction that speaks from doing things so large that elicits our instinctive admiration or at least respect. 

4. Pro tip: bring your friends

But what’s really, REALLY important, said Meyer, is to “win” the debate on television. The morning after any tv debate, he said, readers of newspapers in the whole country should read editorials that proclaim your candidate the winner of the debate.

“Winning the debate is essential in a campaign. If we had lost it, we would have been in a corner.”

So how do you influence the journalists to proclaim you the winner of the debate?

“You don’t. You let other people do it for you. These debates are taking place in a huge film studio. Outside the studio, there’s a huge press center where everybody watches tv. But your guests can also circulate there. So inevitably, you bump into a lot of people that have gathered there: famous sportspeople, musicians, artists, nobel prize winning scientists, business people. And what do journalists do: they ask – who won the debate? The game is simple: invite more people than the other side, and invite more interesting people. This is classical PR work.”