Election Campaign, Courtesy of Ass and Spray
Berlin’s roughest campaign has less to do with policy than with bodily escalation, because the real competition is over who can look shameless enough to stay on the street corner after everyone else leaves.
Moral Contradictions & Night-After Reporting
Berlin’s campaign trail has stopped pretending it is about ideas and settled into the older civic ritual of who can stand nearest the gutter without blinking. In Wedding, Neukölln, and the other overworked corners where the city likes to stage its democracy in public, candidates and campaign workers have reported insults, a feces attack, and one episode of public exhibitionism, a sequence so degraded it feels less like civic life than a municipal dare.
The people paid to manage this circus do not call it what it is. They call it outreach, visibility, engagement, and other little corporate lies with voting stickers on them. On the sidewalk, it looks more like a competition in humiliation management: district politicians trying to look unshakeable, party staffers pretending they are not terrified, and campaign consultants doing what they always do—turning panic into a deck, then billing the republic for the privilege.
The first layer is always the performance of seriousness. A candidate in a windbreaker stands by a tram stop near Leopoldplatz and talks about “listening to concerns” while a volunteer behind her watches a man with a beer and a grievance orbit the flyer table like a low-cost predator. Then comes the bodily insult, the kind of thing campaign offices describe with a straight face because they have to protect the brand. It is not just filth; it is a message. Somebody wants to remind the suit brigade that their moral language is fragile enough to be smeared with one ugly gesture and a cheap grin.
One campaign worker, speaking anonymously because he did not want his district chair to hear that he had been outshouted by a man in orthopedic sandals and a political mission, said the worst part was not the attack itself but the social aftermath. “You can survive being insulted,” he said. “What ruins you is standing there afterward, trying to look like public service while your trousers and shoes have entered a different tax bracket.” That is the whole campaign in one breath: the smell of authority after it has been dragged across the pavement and told to stay camera-ready.
Police have been informed in several cases, and campaign offices are now reviewing routes, timing, and which corners in Wedding and around Gesundbrunnen are convenient enough to risk and ugly enough to script. This is the Berlin version of safety planning: not prevention, just choreography. More volunteers. Shorter appearances. Brighter jackets. Better excuses. A little more distance from the curb, a little more “community” in the caption, and a lot more fear dressed as civic courage.
The obscene genius of the whole arrangement is that it still pays. Every insult proves the candidate matters. Every disgusting gesture produces a clip, a quote, a minor scandal, a tiny burst of moral theater for the campaign’s social channels. The parties do not merely tolerate the degradation; they metabolize it. Volunteer labor becomes disposable cover. Outrage becomes engagement metrics. A corner in Wedding becomes a proof-of-life reel for people whose real constituency is the donor breakfast and the afterparty at some sour little Mitte bar where everyone talks about “democratic resilience” with the mouths of people who have never had to clean anything.
Berlin likes to imagine itself Brechtian about politics, all exposed machinery and principled discomfort. In practice it is more district-office vaudeville for LinkedIn cowards: everybody wants to look dangerous, nobody wants to carry the stain home. The media ecosystem helps by laundering the mess into quaint authenticity—street tension, rough edges, honest democracy, all the usual perfume sprayed over a public humiliation economy. The parties feed on it because they are not trying to end the spectacle; they are trying to own the camera angle.
So the next round of leafleting goes ahead. The next candidate smiles through the sour air. The next volunteer hands out flyers like a witness under oath. And the city, always eager to mistake degradation for realism, keeps rewarding whoever can stand there longest without flinching, as if shame were a civic virtue and not simply the cheapest fuel in Berlin.