Bundestag election: Breakdown in the CDU election video: landscapes with a Danish lake

There were glitches in a CDU election video spot. In the one-minute and seven-second video shared on social media, various landscapes and cities can be seen, as well as candidate for chancellor Friedrich Merz and general secretary Carsten Linnemann. The CDU places messages such as: “A country that we can be proud of again.” At second 53, the camera pans over a wooden terrace and an idyllic lake can be seen – but it is not in Germany, as the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” reported. You can see a lake in Denmark. There was talk in CDU circles of an “office oversight”.

According to the newspaper, the video has long been available on a Danish holiday home ownership sharing website. It originally came from an international agency that sells photos and moving images. This agency also hired a blonde boy who was happily playing in the grass in the CDU video – in the Danish grass. The newspaper also writes that another boy sitting at a laptop appears again and again in advertising and is probably from America.

This is not the first video breakdown for the CDU: in September 2023, an image clip caused ridicule and malice because of an obviously swapped image. Instead of the Reichstag in Berlin, the similar-looking Georgian presidential palace in Tbilisi was shown. The CDU then corrected the film. But the party has learned: In the new election video spot, the Reichstag can be seen right at the beginning – the real one.