IF GERMANY were America, this would be the season of attack ads. But Germany is not America, and attack ads, like Super PACs, are unimaginable here, legally and culturally. There are no deep-pocketed groups who set out to destroy the characters of individual candidates. Even the politicians themselves are remarkably restrained. In part, that is because the two main candidates, chancellor Angela Merkel and her challenger Peer Steinbrück, worked together (he was her finance minister between 2005-09) and genuinely respect each other. But mainly it is because the Germans really don't want to go there. If anybody were to get personal and nasty on an American scale, he or she would get society's red card and be out. This may be the best thing about German democracy. But if you don't have attack ads, you need something else. So Germany has posters. Lots of them. Everywhere. This week I went to an event at a cute little cinema in Berlin's Charlottenburg district where Hermann Gröhe, the general secretary of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Angela Merkel's party, introduced the "second wave" of posters, one of which you see above. The vast majority of posters are tame, if not boring. Typically, you see the local candidate smiling at you and the party's acronym and short slogan. Nonetheless, the parties try to pack more or less subtle messaging into the posters, and that can be telling.

The CDU, for example, clearly wagers everything on the huge popularity of Angela Merkel. It is as though she were the party. Content and "issues" as one might expect them in a party platform are nowhere to be seen. The words accompanying her photos are short, simple and forceful, but also very general. The caption above says "Germany is strong. And shall remain so." This is supposed to remind you that Germany has record employment numbers at a time when other countries are struggling, and that this is no time to change government. (That message is very similiar to another famous CDU slogan from the 1950s: "no experiments".)

The CDU's slogan (the smaller phrase to the right, which appears on all CDU posters) is "successful together" (Gemeinsam erfolgreich). This repeats the idea of success but combines it with a collective message ("together"). That is probably an attempt to steal some of the thunder from the left parties, whose rallying cry is "social justice". Simultaneously, it differentiates the CDU from the Free Democrats (FDP), the CDU's current and preferred coalition partner. That smaller liberal party runs on "more courage, more market, more freedom", as one of its posters near my house says, but is often caricatured by its critics as excessively individualistic.

The SPD's posters and TV spots reflect a completely different strategy, and different problems. Of course some of its posters, like the one to the right, show Peer Steinbrück. But the SPD is aware that he has not struck much of a chord with the electorate and may even hurt the party's prospects. In his suit, and with his history of giving highly paid speeches, he does not exactly leap into blue-collar hearts. So the SPD uses a lot of ordinary people with ordinary problems in its messaging. That is supposed to remind you that Germany has a crisis in social justice. The risk is that it looks and sounds too pessimistic in a country that really is doing rather well. The SPD has also got lots of flak for its slogan, which you can barely make out on this poster. It is:

Das Wir entscheidet

. That could be translated as "the We decides" or as "the We matters". Either way, it sounds as daft in German as in English. Am I, the viewer, part of this We, and should I feel thrilled about that? Or are you, the SPD, the We that reminds me who's the boss? I have yet to talk to anybody outside the SPD who thinks that the slogan means anything at all.All the parties have posters out, of course, but I'll just mention one more. Among people I've talked to, this one is considered the most noxious. It comes from The Left (

Die Linke

). It descends mainly from the Communist party of the former East Germany and picked up Marxists and other anti-Capitalists from West Germany along the way, as well as quite a few people who left the SPD when it enacted labour-market reforms a decade ago. To The Left, threatening class warfare is still cool. In their programme, they promise "biting upward" (

Biss nach oben

). Yes, the SPD and Greens want to introduce new taxes and levies, respectively, on wealth (in addition to income). But The Left outdoes them all. This poster displays their mentality quite well, I think. It translates as "Sharing is fun: millionaires' tax!" That could also mean "Dividing is fun." It drips with sarcasm. In The Left's worldview, nobody "rich" would ever share anything voluntarily. But you can always rely on

them

to redistribute

other people's

stuff, perhaps even yours. How fun that would be (for them).

(Photo credits: Andreas Kluth)