It all depends on the suit

Politicians play a double role in the election campaign.

You present yourself as a politician and as a citizen at the same time. The Hamburg CDU state chairman Christoph Ploß applies for re-election as a member of the Bundestag for Hamburg-Nord with a three-minute film and lets you know that he would like to learn something through role play.

"I get special insights into the everyday working life of citizens on my internship tours."

Patrick Bahners

Features correspondent in Cologne and responsible for “humanities”.

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Jürgen Kaube

Editor.

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Stefan Trinks

Editor in the features section.

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Sandra Kegel

Responsible editor for the features section.

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You can see that on these tours the MP swaps his work clothes, the blue suit that his candidate for Chancellor prefers, for protective vests of different colors in order to help clean the streets, at the supermarket checkout or when loading luggage at the airport.

It is not communicated how long these guest performances last, and of course one sees nothing of the disruption of the established processes, which is inevitable if a doctorate intern has to be accommodated while doing shared manual labor.

Politics intervenes in everyday life and leaves it intact: That is how you imagine it, or at least that is how the CDU imagines the ideas of its electorate.

Not all moments of acting are marked in the film by Ploß. To illustrate his commitment to local public transport, he stands in front of a ticket office and rummages in his wallet for coins before boarding the elevated train. As a member of the Bundestag, however, he has a Bahncard 100, which entitles him to free use of public transport in most major cities. The Bundestag allows the members of parliament to use the free driving permit for appointments to the constituencies. Klein Borstel, a stop on the U1 line, is in the Hamburg transport association's AB tariff zone, which is covered by the Bahncard 100.

Ploß assures that he knows every corner of his constituency because he grew up there. At this sentence you can see a large green meadow at the edge of the forest from the air. A street in which one must assume rented population is also only flown over; For the longest time, Ploß walks through green streets with single-family houses, with an attentive expression like a real estate agent during the acquisition process. He chose two Protestant brick churches as backdrops, the Bergstädter Church and St. Nicolaus in Alsterdorf, no mosque and no cultural association. During an internship tour, two non-white people appear in the background for a fraction of a second.

In an interview with Der Spiegel magazine, Ploß made a name for himself as an opponent of gender language.

He avoids such sharp tones in the film.

If the CDU loses the election, one has to prepare for a culture war in which the will to distinguish is expressly emerged behind the appearance of refinement.

Patrick Bahners

Play us the song of the party

In the last election campaign before reunification, Helmut Kohl and Johannes Rau faced each other in 1987. When asked about their favorite music, Rau said “Tschaikowsky” and Kohl “Hans Albers”. That’s how the election turned out. At least they both said something. When the music magazine Rolling Stone asked Olaf Scholz about his favorite album, he avoided it. He likes rock, jazz, classical, so it would be inappropriate to define it. Scholz thus corresponds to the strong diversification of taste that sociologists have long noticed in bourgeois milieus. It is no longer exclusively heard, read, and watched, and there are no longer any clear favorites. Wagner and Verdi, Bad Bunny and the Beatles, Jan Garbarek and Jan Delay, the stomach of the “cultural omnivores” (Richard Peterson) is strong.