The SPD has no credible answer to Germany’s Iron Lady as polling day nears

As symbolism goes, it borders on cliché. Running out of time to gain any serious traction, Germany’s Social Democrats last week unveiled their new campaign posters, and they promptly disintegrated on first contact with rain. The seven images neatly chronicle – or will do once they’re replaced – the profound failure of the main challengers to Angela Merkel’s re-election to provide any serious challenge at all.

The first four have pictures of determinedly normal people standing alongside a totemic policy pledge: more childcare provision, lower rents, higher pensions, introduction of a minimum wage (Germany still doesn’t have one, though it has been a perennially topical debate). This is where the SPD really wanted to fight this campaign: leftish, social democratic policy suggestions aimed at people’s everyday concerns.

Hit-and-miss presentation and a good deal of in-fighting have partially obscured this message, but the biggest factor in its failure to penetrate has been the CDU’s longstanding tactic of so-called “asymmetric demobilisation”.