Seven weeks ahead of the upcoming Berlin state elections, the German capital will be plastered with some 250,000 election campaign posters. The parties that are up for election on September 20th are allowed to promote themselves as well as their candidates from noon today. A race for the best poster locations was about to begin today.
According to the “Tagesspiegel”, some campaign posters were hung up early. The conservative CDU, the center-left SPD and the far-left pro-Putin party BSW ignored the rules at some locations, the German-language daily reported.
Berliners will vote for delegates in the city state’s House of Representatives and in the district assemblies all over the city. This time the minimum voting age is 16. There is another novelty: Voters will get one very long ballot instead of the two they used to have, meaning the candidates for both the House and the assemblies are listed on one piece of paper.
Two Problems
According to the “Tagesspiegel”, the Christian Democrats (CDU) of Governing Mayor Kai Wegner intend to hang up 60,000 regular campaign posters on lamp posts and 1,000 extra large ones. The party has two problems: In the latest polls, it slid down to second place, which it shares with the far-left party Die Linke since the extremist right-wing AfD overtook both of them. And they have only weeks to introduce their new main candidate Stefan Evers to the voters.
Die Linke will hang up 36,000 regular campaign posters plus 250 large ones, the AfD 25,000 plus 250. With a record 73,000 posters, the SPD might win the poster war, but maybe not the election, since it dropped down to 13 percent in the latest poll. It is unclear exactly how many posters the Greens had printed. The center-right FDP will go into this campaign with 14,500 posters and the BSW with 13,000.
