“Moin Hamburg”, calls Annalena Baerbock and pronounces the city name as if it ended with a ch.

“Hamburch” sounds pretty Hamburgish.

Baerbock stands in a bright red jacket on a stage made of green artificial turf on Jungfernstieg.

Since August 9th she has been on tour all over the country, she has already given her campaign speech thirteen times, and another 25 appearances are scheduled for election day.

In Hamburg, too, she says the typical green election campaign sentences with lots of big words.

"The big question of the future of our time is climate protection, because it is not only a question of environmental policy, but also of industrial and economic policy and also a question of security and freedom."

Helene Bubrowski

Political correspondent in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

But the speechwriter made sure that the audience didn't get the feeling that a record was being played here. Just as Baerbock spoke about Passau in Passau and Weimar in Weimar, Hamburg is about Hamburg. She praises the city for a referendum that was eight years ago: the people of Hamburg voted to buy back the energy networks. Baerbock calls: "You show that renewal is possible!"

And then there comes the second when it's not quite there. She addressed her audience directly again, "here in the marketplace," she says. That was true in many cities where she was before. It's not true in Hamburg. Baerbock corrects herself immediately that she knows that Jungfernstieg is not a marketplace, after all, she studied in Hamburg. That can happen, and yet the image of a woman getting involved in a city is destroyed. This is often the case with Baerbock: She wants to do everything right, and that is precisely why her mistakes are so serious.

"Annalena is in the tunnel," says a Green man who is close to the candidate for chancellor.

"In the tunnel" is election campaign speech.

What is meant by this is that a candidate is fully concentrated, does not allow himself to be confused, does not look back, but goes through the matter.

Good election campaigners spend the hot phase in the tunnel.

Annalena Baerbock is smiling particularly hard these days, she put another layer on the make-up.

She no longer constantly talks about the mistakes of the past months, has regained her footing, the appearances are going pretty smoothly.

Baerbock fights, but seems frozen.

Shortly after the climax, the fall began

In the spring, Baerbock gave the impression that someone like her didn't need a tunnel, but could float over cliffs and other obstacles. The story of their hard landing is well known. A few days after their nomination for candidate for chancellor, the Greens suddenly stood at 28 percent, Baerbock smiled from the front pages of newspapers and magazines. The case began shortly after the climax: first it was the reports on additional income that she had not reported to the Bundestag administration, then she had to correct her curriculum vitae several times. It got really bad when allegations of plagiarism were raised against her book and she first defiantly counterattacked and then had to admit that she had made another mistake. In the polls, the Greens slipped a full ten percentage points within four months.