Chancellor candidate in crisis: Laschet's mistake in the flood

The power of images in everyday politics is great.

It is huge in election campaign times.

On Thursday, Armin Laschet wanted to leave for the first tour of his Bundestag campaign.

The Union's candidate for chancellor planned to visit a boxing camp in Frankfurt, to stroll through the old town of Heidelberg and to walk on a treetop path in the Black Forest.

Many harmless glossy photos would have been taken in the three days.

In view of the ongoing acute emergency of tens of thousands of flood victims in Rhineland-Palatinate and in Laschet's own federal state, the images would have been completely inappropriate.

So the CDU called the matter off.

The North Rhine-Westphalian Prime Minister is currently indispensable, the situation in the domestic flood regions requires "his full attention".

Laschet could have bravely filled the vacuum

So far, so natural.

What was astonishing, however, was that the message was sent to Holterdiepolter less than 24 hours before the planned start of the tour.

The catastrophe has been tying Laschet's full attention for three weeks almost around the clock.

But his team in the Adenauer house didn't seem to have noticed until Wednesday.

That fits with the previously thoroughly messed up campaign under the feel-good motto “Do Germany together”.

It was only a few weeks ago that Laschet put himself in front of his competitors Annalena Baerbock from the Greens and Olaf Scholz from the SPD in the polls.

Even without personal profiling, a “Laschet habituation effect” set in - as the pollster Manfred Güllner put it - but it was not stable.

After all, people still couldn't associate any qualities with the Union's candidate for chancellor.

Laschet could have bravely filled this vacuum and easily expanded his lead over Baerbock and Scholz if he had achieved what Chancellor Gerhard Schröder did 19 years ago.

The Social Democrat was in the polls when a flood of the century hit Saxony particularly hard.

In August 2002, Schröder immediately knew what to do: he let himself be guided through the devastated and muddy Grimma in rubber boots and accompanied by large media support, encouraged the desperate and announced quick, unbureaucratic help.

Schröder won the election.

In times of disaster, the executive branch strikes.

Regardless of whether the election is on or not.

With a pinch of Schröder's or, alternatively, Söder's chutzpah, Laschet could have signaled to the flood victims: Today I will stand by you as the father of the country, and after the federal elections in Berlin I will make sure that you will not be forgotten in the years to come.

That would not have been measured, but appropriate to the situation.

After all, the devastation and hardship are so great that reconstruction will take years of national effort.

But the chancellor candidate quarreled with his role, his communication remained erratic, he stumbled upon his Deichgraf moment.

Activists feasted on Laschet's image GAU

When Laschet visited Altena on the first day after the catastrophe without media support, he asserted that it was not about a situation “with which one wants to create images”.

It was vain in a weird way, but above all dishonest.

A little later, he had his State Chancellery publish photos of the visit on Twitter.

On top of that, Laschet made a bad faux pas after two days of intensive crisis management.

While Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was commemorating the flood victims in Erftstadt, the cameras in the background caught a laughing and smirking Laschet.

Activists on Twitter, who otherwise have to spend a lot of time and effort producing distorted images, could refresh themselves in Laschet's image GAU.

In surveys, the Union's candidate for chancellor has now crashed.

He gambled away his lead over Baerbock and Scholz.

Many respondents do not think Laschet is a good crisis manager.

In order to regain his footing, Laschet has no choice but to try to produce pictures that show him in this same role.

This is not easy because anger and despair grow in the flood areas.

In addition, Laschet does not appear as a doer who courageously shows perspectives and conveys clear messages.

Instead, at his appointments, he often plays the role of the scapegoat, onto which the anger over communal crisis management is dumped.

If Laschet is then suspected in Swisttal, as was the case last week, that he only wanted to campaign anyway, he reacts irritably and unscrupulously. An unfavorably shortened snippet of the scene landed immediately on the net of course. He is actually an empathetic carer. In the hour of the pictures, however, what seems to fit into the picture remains stuck.