"We have more to offer":
CDU candidate Vera Lengsfeld (right)
and Chancellor Angela Merkel

IN GERMANY, POLITICS HAS traditionally been a serious business. But this year, with the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU)  expected to continue its uninspiring grand coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD) following the September 27 election, all parties are willing to take a few more chances than usual and even show a little skin. And yet, even in this traditionally sexist society there are still a few no-go zones that one enters at one's peril.

The new trend really got going in early August, when shapely fifty-seven year-old CDU candidate Vera Lengsfeld, a former East German dissident from the hip Berlin district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, posed for an electoral poster alongside a stock image of an equally ample Chancellor Angela Merkel above the words "We have more to offer." Merkel's own wildly controversial photo, showing her in a low cut dress at an opera performance in Oslo, Norway, had already hit the press a year earlier.

Angela Merkel in Oslo, April 2008:
Too sexy to be chancellor?

Lengsfeld's initiative is part of a general trend among all the major parties to harness (female) sexuality to capture votes. Most of this election material is locally produced and aimed at local issues and candidates, giving it a loose cannon quality that frequently raises eyebrows - and hackles - at the parties' national headquarters in Berlin. For example, a CDU poster drafted by the party organization in the Brandenburg town of Wandlitz earlier this year showed a semi-nude bosom with the words "Don't let it get red [i.e. leftist]! Choose [vote for] a high sunscreen factor - the CDU."

 
Anti-SPD poster by the CDU:
"Don't let it get red!"

This theme was too "hot" for the Wandlitz CDU and the poster did not last long. But the Young Union (the CDU youth organization) branch in the North Sea coastal town of Wittmund showed a little more gumption when it printed up placards showing a young man's hands reaching into a young woman's slip above the words "We go deeper!"

"Sex in the workplace is great!"

Of course, the SPD already has some experience with this sort of publicity. Back in the 1990s, the Potsdam politician Thomas Krüger ran for the Bundestag with a poster showing him dressed entirely in his birthday suit.

"An honest skin" [an honest soul]

In the meantime, the "Left Party," which mainly consists of remnants of the old East German communist party and a consortium of various other leftist groups, has been soliciting votes with a poster showing its own candidate for Berlin's Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district flaunting a "tramp stamp" bearing the word "socialist." (As hard as it may be for Americans to believe, German leftists actually relish the term "socialist.")

But when the Green Party organization in the lower Rhine town of Kaarst tried to strike a blow for interracial tolerance and against homophobia by creating a poster showing a pair of white female hands clutching a black female backside, the charges of racism and sexism fell so fast and furious within the party's own ranks that the local group had to remove the posters over night. Of course, irony was never part of the Greens' platform.

 

So what will happen to the Lengsfeld poster? A controversy has been smoldering for weeks, particularly within the CDU itself. Lengsfeld herself argues that since her party only polled 12.4 percent in that district in the last election, she can use all the help she can get. In fact, the candidate has even started selling leftover posters via mail order for thirty Euros a hit. It costs seventy with a personal autograph. The proceeds go to her campaign.

There is no news on whether Chancellor Merkel will get a cut of that sum or even what she thinks about the poster. She is obviously aware that many Germans still have a hard time accepting a female head of government, especially one who is as ruthless as Merkel has proven to be against all of her male rivals. When asked recently what she had to say about the controversy, she merely shrugged and said: "That's what happens when a woman is elected chancellor." But she appears to be taking this new attention in stride. The focus on her upper reaches certainly has helped to soften her once frumpy and uncaring image. Even before her Oslo extravaganza, Merkel had been increasingly identified via her breasts. Her public persona is rapidly becoming that of the nurturing mother of her nation, a role guaranteed not to intimidate a notoriously male-dominated society.

  Angela Merkel, mother of the Fatherland, in a gentle caricature

But not all of this attention to her décolleté is welcome. In 2007 the Polish magazine Wprost came close to provoking an international incident with its western neighbor by decorating its front cover with a gleeful Angela Merkel nourishing the Polish politician twins Lech und Jaroslaw Kaczynski with a pair of queen-sized mammaries. The last anyone heard, Merkel wasn't offering to autograph copies - at any price.