Bundestag election – green election campaign: Robert Habeck becomes Helmut Kohl

I am a advertiser. So I am one of that questionable group of people who tries to convince people of products. It is secondary whether it is a solar panel or sunscreen, pimple ointment or parties. At the beginning there is always the same question: Who is the target group and how do I reach it?

In the case of the Greens, the answer to this is not that easy. In the past, in the 80s, the party was the political equivalent of Jehovah’s Witnesses. With gloomy doom scenarios, she set the counterpoint for general wealth satisfaction in the old Federal Republic. While the big parties with slogans like “Keep it up!” (CDU) and “reconciliation instead of columns” (SPD) appeased their voters, the Greens summon the world end. Environmental contamination, nuclear power and nuclear weapons threatened to destroy the earth. The only question was: who would die first, humanity or the forest?

The Greens were professionals in the anxiety. “A piece of nature dies every day! The industry is doing cash! ”You drove well with such slogans. Until the 1990 Bundestag election campaign, when the bill “Dystopia + Fear = Green Election Success” no longer rose. In the reunification euphoria, even many regular voters did not want to hear how badly the weather was – the right message at the wrong time. The Greens failed in the former West Germany at the five percent hurdle, a traumatic experience.

After that, people avoided creating panic. It was – at least from a marketing perspective – no longer the need to frighten the voters. Especially not in green strongholds like Baden-Württemberg. Anyone who was busy with the house construction did not expect the end of the world for the foreseeable future. Fear has now been used ironically. A green election poster in 2002 showed Stoiber, Westerwelle and Möllemann. The associated slogan was: “So that the nightmare does not become a reality”. You smiled and preferred to choose “Joschka”, because it was finally “outside minister, green inside”.

In general, green election posters were a little cheeky and funky than that of political competition. But just a little. They did not want to unnecessarily provoke the new better earners who had closed their peace with Germany and capitalism (while their “Joschka” drove the war in ex-Yugoslavia and Afghanistan).

The 2017 Bundestag election program – freely according to Nena – carried the title “Future is made out of courage”. That the song that stood for this motto was “somehow, somewhere, at some point”, fit into the picture. They continued to maintain the habitus of the revolutionary who wanted to change the world but had no hurry. First of all, the loy for the Loft in the Schanzenviertel, Prenzlauer Berg or one of the numerous other gentrified districts of Germany had to be paid off. Fortunately, one was part of generation of heirs.

You had to imagine the well-off green voter as happy people. Didn’t he prove by the contradictions of postmodern Woken Woken Capitalism that a real life in the wrong one was possible?

But then, just in time for the new decade, the beloved world went crazy. Inflation also came with Corona, the collapse of the supply chains, the Russian war against Ukraine and the shortage of energy. Why was the follow -up financing of the purchase of real estate suddenly connected with peppered interest? Why were restaurant visits so expensive? And why was the money no longer enough for the third -party vacation?

But it was not just monetary, well, bottlenecks that put on the green voters. In horror, he found that his party, who only wanted the best, was hostile. He no longer understood the world. Now it was revenge that he had never understood the connections between business and voters. He would only have to remember Bill Clinton’s Slogan “It’s the Economy, Stupid!” (“It depends on the economy, Dösbattel!”) With which he won the choice against George Bush in 1992.

But something had changed. With the AfD, a new party entered the political stage in 2013. From the beginning, she used a tactic that had already helped the Greens to climb in the 80s: maintain enemy pictures, stir up fear, panic. And lo and behold, it worked this time too. With the difference: The AfD does not see the German forest in danger, but the German being.

And suddenly the Greens find themselves in that role, the CDU and SPD held in the old Federal Republic. They are the lord seal keepers who appeal to the good, satisfied citizens. This is shown by your current Bundestag election campaign, where you only need to replace your heads to find yourself – Schwuppdiwupp – in the blessed 80s. Just imagine the word “confidence” instead of Robert Habeck Helmut Kohl – fits! “Together”, on the other hand-the term that Annalena Baerbock and Green Direct candidates advertise-would be tailor-made for “brother Johannes”, that is, the pastoral Johannes Rau, who tried his luck as a SPD chancellor candidate in 1987 with “reconciliation instead of split”.

So everything as before? Not quite. Word and picture seem to contradict each other in the green poster motifs. While Helmut Kohl even exuded the bastard (if you enjoyed eating so much, an optimist had to be), Robert Habeck’s facial expressions are skeptical. You can see that the massive criticism of recent years has left its mark. The chosen vocabulary also appears out of place at Annalena Baerbock. The Foreign Minister has the broadcast of a lone fighter. This woman does not want to achieve anything “together”; She has proven that she can do it alone.

However, the green voters are likely to overlook such cognitive dissonances. It is sufficient that “a person” like Robert Habeck “finds a word” like “confidence”. After the election, everything is usually different. “And man is called man because he forgets because he is suppressed” (Herbert Grönemeyer).