Keine Experimente!” — “No experiments!” — was the successful electoral slogan of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the 1957 Bundestag elections. Appealing to the precarious prosperity of West Germany’s post-war Wirtschaftswunder, it was intended to warn against votes for the Social Democratic Party (SPD), regarded as an untrustworthy wildcard within the context of Cold War and national recovery. The appeal to security and stability worked: the CDU achieved 50.2% in the elections, and obtained 55% of the seats in the Bundestag, giving it an absolute majority.

While Angela Merkel’s CDU fell just short of an absolute majority in the national elections this past Sunday, a similar appeal to stability and security was at play, and provided the conservatives with their greatest electoral victory at the national level in twenty years. In a Europe wracked by economic crisis and political turmoil, Germany has remained an island of relative stability, untouched by the crisis and even continuing a wave of economic growth. The victory of Angela Merkel’s CDU represents an affirmation of this stability and tranquility, and the desire for its maintenance.

The electoral campaign of the CDU was remarkable for its complete lack of political content. The party avoided any attempt to either brag about policy successes of the last four years of the “Black-Yellow” coalition government with the right-liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), nor did it attempt to push forward any new policy initiatives or proposal for the next governing period. Instead, the campaign was focused entirely on the personality of Merkel. CDU electoral posters and billboards all featured images of the chancellor adorned with empty bromides such as “Gemeinsam erfolgreich” (“Successful together”).