**A German politician has unleashed a new weapon to soften up voters in Berlin: Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bust, alongside her own.**Vera Lengsfeld, 57, has ruffled feathers in Mrs Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrat (CDU) party with the unauthorised CDU election poster.
“We have more to offer” is the slogan on the poster, 750 copies of which were hung in Kreuzberg district of Berlin.
Mrs Lengsfeld faces an uphill struggle against a popular Green politician.
“I needed to come up with something to even be noticed,” Mrs Lengsfeld said, adding that the posters had massively boosted traffic to her website.
FROM BBC WORLD SERVICE
She is hoping to win a parliamentary seat in Germany’s 27 September general elections.
But the incumbent Green politician Hans-Christian Stroebele has won twice previously in the Kreuzberg district.
The shot of Mrs Merkel sporting an evening gown with plunging neckline was taken at the 2008 opening of Oslo’s opera house.
Some of the posters have been stolen as souvenirs since they went up on Sunday, the AFP news agency reports.
A CDU spokesman said Mrs Lengsfeld’s poster campaign had not been agreed with the party.
And the CDU women’s arm chided Mrs Lengsfeld, saying, “We don’t need to do things like this any more.”