BERLIN — With seven weeks to go until German elections, billboards of Chancellor Angela Merkel sporting a very revealing low-cut dress have pepped up a campaign that has so far struggled to grab public attention.
The election placards have been put up by Vera Lengsfeld, from Merkel's conservative CDU party, who is running in a long-shot race in a left-wing district of Berlin for a parliamentary seat in the September 27 poll.
They show photographs of each woman in an evening dress showing plenty of cleavage with the slogan: "We have more to offer" emblazoned over the chancellor's breasts.
Lengsfeld, a former East German dissident, said she had not cleared the picture beforehand with Merkel, 55, telling rolling news channel N24: "The chancellor could never have allowed me to do this, otherwise everyone would have wanted to do it."
The 57-year-old candidate has hung 750 posters in her district and local media have reported a few stolen as souvenirs.
Lengsfeld said over 17,000 people had visited her election blog since she shot into the public eye.
"If only a tenth of them also look at the content of my policies, I will have reached many more people than I could have done with classic street canvassing."
She will have her work cut out, however, to transform the limelight into success at the ballot box against a popular Green party veteran.
Meanwhile the women's arm of the CDU chided Lengsfeld for an outdated "sex sells" campaign: "We don't need to do things like this anymore," its head, Maria Boehmer, told a news conference.
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