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PROFESSIONALISATION OF POLITICS IN GERMANY | 71

not new, this trend became more obvious during the 1998 campaign and was one
reason for the extended debate about the new style campaign (Holtz-Bacha,2000).

While the 1998 SPD campaign was praised as being highly professional and also proved
to be successful with the voters, things turned out to be different for the election
campaign in 2002.This again proves the fact that context factors play an important role
and provide specific conditions for each campaign. In particular, the SPD, having been
in government since 1998, had to go into the campaign as the governing party while
the CDU this time was the challenger. Kampa 02 now found an effective counterpart in
the CDU’s Arena 02. Unlike Kampa, Arena 02 was part of the CDU headquarters and not
a separate unit.

In addition to the challenge of having to campaign as the incumbent, the SPD had to
deal with the fact that its popularity shrank sharply in early 2002.The CDU took the lead
in the polls early in 2002 until about two weeks before Election Day on September 22.
However, while the SPD struggled around 35%, its top candidate, Chancellor Gerhard
Schröder, was much more popular. The gap between him and his party amounted to
15% and more. Against this backdrop, even if the party had not planned a
personalisation strategy before, it would have been forced to focus on the chancellor.
Schröder himself declared that the election would be a decision between ‘him or me’
soon after the Christian Democrats had chosen the Bavarian prime minister Edmund
Stoiber as their chancellor candidate. In fact, personalisation and, to an extent not
known before, privatisation became the main characteristics of campaign 2002 (cf.
Holtz-Bacha,2003; Schulz,2003;Wilke & Reinemann,2003).

Since Stoiber was known to be a conservative hardliner and a controversial candidate
for voters in North and East Germany, and for women in particular, Schröder’s claim also
aimed at a polarisation on issues. The CDU, however, did not fall for the provocation. It
was the accomplishment of Stoiber’s personal adviser Michael Spreng, a former tabloid
journalist, to get rid of the candidate’s conservative image and move him more to the
middle of the political spectrum.To make him appear somewhat softer and eligible for
women, his wife, daughters and even grandsons served an important function during
the campaign. On the other side, as a counterpoint to Stoiber’s purportedly
conservative ideas about the role of women in society,Schröder’s wife was brought into
the campaign to represent the modern woman, having been a single mother before
her marriage,mastering a dual role in the family and her profession. Professionalisation of Politics in Germany

Not just because of his personal disadvantages as a candidate, Stoiber pushed what
was called his competence team, a kind of a shadow cabinet, and tried to campaign on
issues and on one issue in particular – and that was jobs.Therefore, Schröder’s attempt
at campaigning on his personal popularity and drawing Stoiber into a personal battle
did not fully succeed. As a consequence, Schröder either had to counter the jobs issue
or had to distract attention from this uncomfortable problem.The issue was countered 73