Cardboard cut-outs of Germany’s election candidates have sprouted on lampposts

YOU KNOW it’s election time in Germany when every lamppost sprouts the grinning face of a politician. The placards appear suddenly. Local authorities decide on a date and time, and activists race to get their ladders out: popular lampposts on busy roads are hot property.The images on the placards and the posters have barely changed since 1949, when modern Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, stared ferociously into the middle distance above the words “Peace, Freedom and Unity”. Today’s would-be chancellors use the same technique: a face, a party name and a slogan. But strategists now analyse how to transmit the party’s core message in the two seconds voters on average spend looking at a poster. What look like bland photos are carefully, and expensively, choreographed.