On the seventeenth day of her election campaign, Alicia Bokler meets Olaf Scholz.

The sun is shining, the chemical company Merck in Darmstadt has invited to a factory tour and a press conference.

Bokler is allowed to be there because she “knows the industry from the inside”, as her party colleagues say.

It's late morning, she comes from one appointment and then has to go to the next, like Scholz.

Everywhere there are men with ties, on the edge they are: black blazers, blonde, very straight hair.

Because the candidate for chancellor speaks so softly on the tour that you can’t hear anything three meters further, all keep their heads bent in his direction.

Elena Witzeck

Editor in the features section.

  • Follow I follow

When it's over, Bokler and Scholz press their fists together in front of the cameras. Then she takes pictures of him in bulk, which she later puts on the net. There was no time for a conversation. Still, Bokler smiles. She has never been this close, otherwise she saw him on TV. Surprising that he speaks so softly.

Alicia Bokler, the SPD's Bundestag candidate for the Hessian constituency 176, has to be loud to be heard.

Then she says, for example, “cheek” and “essential” and “plain and simple”.

When it comes to the allegation that the SPD wants to increase taxes and the CDU lower them, but also when it speaks of a lack of wind turbines or bad bus connections in the countryside.

If you follow her in the weeks leading up to the election, she often gives the feeling that a lot has really stood still in Germany, as she says.

As if the SPD hadn't even participated in government.

First day of the election campaign

A Saturday at the beginning of August, Bokler's first vacation day and at the same time her first in the election campaign.

In front of the village community center in Grävenwiesbach, an area full of forest, rape and hills over which SUVs dash, the SPD is in the mood for the coming weeks.

A man in a hat and guitar plays labor movement songs.

The comrades from the constituency sit on beer benches, you can see striped shirts, pretzels and red T-shirts with Bokler's likeness.

The constituency 176 is one of the wealthiest in Hesse.

Unemployment is below and income is well above the Hessian average.

In a nationwide comparison of the districts with the wealthiest senior citizens, the Hochtaunus was last in tenth place just behind Starnberg and Lake Constance.

An older woman in a red leather jacket leans over the table and whispers that she doesn't even know Bokler, who comes from Villmar in the Limburg-Weilburg district about twenty kilometers away. She herself, says the woman, only dared to join the SPD after her husband's death. The local association was constantly looking for committed people, she would only have opened her mouth once, and an office would have been forced upon her. Next to her sits a man who talks about the war.

The Hochtaunus has been a CDU country since time immemorial. Alicia Bokler, twenty-seven years old, biology laboratory assistant, is the Hochtaunus-SPD's first female candidate for the Bundestag. 14th place on the list, not ideal. Four years ago, the SPD and CDU were thirteen percent apart in constituency 176; before that, the gap was even greater. Markus Koob has been a member of the Bundestag since 2013, a lawyer who longs for a Jamaica coalition. Bokler avoids Koob's name.