| Political show for unsteady Germans Last night, the first pre-election television duel between current Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel, his rival from the conservative bloc CDU/CSU, took place on four German television channels at once. The fight was broadcast by the socio-political channels ARD and TsDF, as well as the largest private ones - Sat1 and RTL.
For Schröder, this was an almost win-win fight - it was not for nothing that the German media nicknamed him the “media chancellor” and the “chancellor-showman.” The final results of yesterday's 90-minute skirmish on air became known only late in the evening. However, experts unanimously considered Schroeder the favorite.
An expert at the Duisburg-Essen Institute of Political Science, sociologist Thorsten Faas, noted that “in all categories of voters, a clear majority expects Schröder to win.” About 70% of respondents were confident that the current chancellor would win in the television duel. Moreover, 45% of CDU/CSU party supporters surveyed are convinced of Schröder’s personal superiority. Only 35% of Christian Democrats hoped that their candidate Angela Merkel would prevail in the dispute.
But if the parliamentary elections themselves had taken place yesterday, Schröder could hardly have counted on victory. According to a poll by the CDF TV channel, only 32% of voters would vote for the Social Democrats, and 42% for Merkel with the CDU/CSU.
For the first time in the history of German democracy, election debates took place in the fall of 2002. Then Chancellor Schröder, who was running for a second term, went into a televised duel against his CDU/CSU rival, Bavarian Edmund Stoiber.
Can compelling debate on television help a politician win elections? After the Schröder-Stoiber debate, only 2-3% of television viewers admitted that the spectacle changed their voting position. Experts believe that the television duel only strengthens voters' previous political sympathies: after all, the Germans are trying to identify the strengths in “their” candidate, and the weaknesses in the “alien” candidate. True, there are still “hesitant” and “wobblers” who have not made their choice. According to polls, no more than a third of German voters consider television duels to be an “important stage” of the election campaign. For others, political TV shows do not play a special role. Yuri Shpakov, Berlin |
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