Posters and Election Propaganda

Three books with posters that promoted Barack Obama for president of the U.S. last year have just been released:

• Hope: A Collection of Obama Posters and Prints by Hal Elliott Wert. With more than 170 posters (many little known) from Wert's collection and a foreword by Ray Noland, the street artist who created "The Dream." Wert is a professor at the Kansas City Art Institute.
• Design for Obama. Posters for Change: A Grassroots Anthology, edited by Spike Lee and Aaron Perry-Zucker, with an essay by Steven Heller. A selection of posters from  designforobama.org. Heller is Co-chair of the School of Visual Arts MFA Designer as Author Program and writes a column on visual design for the The New York Times Book Review. You can leaf through the book on the publisher's Web site.
• Art for Obama: Designing Manifest Hope and the Campaign for Change, edited by Shepard Fairey and Jennifer Gross. Fairey, of course, is the controversial street artist who created the most prominent image of Obama. This collection reportedly has many collages, paintings, photo composites, prints, and computer-generated designs, with many by little known artists, as well, but also posters by Ron English and Fairey.

The next general election in the United Kingdom must take place by June 3, 2010. All seats in the House of Commons will be filled. In the latest Guardian/ICM poll, the Conservatives lead with 44% support, followed by the ruling Labour Party (27%), the Liberals (18%), and Others (11%). Among the last group is the British National Party (BNP). One poll, however, had the BNP potentially gaining 22% of the vote, after BNP Leader Nick Griffin appeared on BBC Television.

The BNP is appealing to "the indigenous, white British people ... which successive governments have done far too little to protect,” according to the Telegraph. The party has campaigned to celebrate "White History Month," protested government funds given to a Moslem group, fought government immigration policies, and more (see the BNP Web site).

BNP posters, billboards, and videos have tried to link the party's image to past British leaders and glories. One poster shows Winston Churchill and British airmen during World War II; a billboard links the BNP to Jesus; a video (which includes many posters) on the party's Web site defends the party and its stands—calling for citizens to "take back" the country—as well as associating it with past achievements by the English.

The Swiss People's Party (SVP) is at it again—this time with a poster urging a ban on the building of any minarets in the country. The poster shows a woman in a burka and the minarets on top of a Swiss flag. Some have said that the minarets look like missiles. There will be a referendum on November 29 on a possible ban on the building of new minarets.

The cities of Zurich, Geneva, Lucerne, and Winterthur have allowed this poster to be displayed as a matter of freedom of speech, according to BBC News. However, Basel, Lausanne and Fribourg have banned the public display of the poster.

According to a poll, about 35% of voters favor the ban, while 51% are opposed to it.

The SVP has issued controversial posters previously, including the "black sheep" poster of 2007 and the "black crows" poster of 2008.

The SVP is the top vote-getting party in parliamentary elections in Switzerland.

[Thanks to Joshua Seidman-Zager for sending the link to the BBC News article.]

President Manuel Zelaya was ousted by the Honduran military in a June 28th coup, after he planned to have a vote on a non-binding resolution on constitutional change.

If voters had approved such change, a referendum authorizing a commission to change the country's constitution to allow presidents (including Zelaya) to serve more than one term, could have been held this November. However, Zelaya denied that he intended to stand for re-election. In any case, the Supreme Court and the Congress voted that the change was illegal, and that Zelaya could not fire the head of the armed forces, Romeo Vásquez (who had opposed his plan). When Zelaya did not accept the rulings by the Supreme Court and Congress (as well as the county's human-rights ombudsman), they voted to remove him from office.

It was feared by many that Zelaya (allied with Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Cuba's Fidel Castro) was working to seize power. Protests and sanctions by other governments have wracked Honduras since his ouster. The United States and many other countries (as well as the Organization of American States) have said that the crisis concerning Zelaya must be resolved or the upcoming November 28 election will be considered to be illegitimate. Polls indicate that Zelaya has the support of about one-fourth of Hondurans.

Zelaya is now being protected by Brazil, in its embassy in Honduras. Interim President Roberto Micheletti (a member of Zelaya's Liberal Party) has stated that Zelaya can leave the embassy "either through political asylum or by obeying the courts." And last week, Micheletti suspended civil liberties and banned protests.

Meanwhile, six candidates for the Honduran presidency are now campaigning, but without the typical rallies. The campaign posters that are put up are almost immediately destroyed and/or taken down, but TV spots have continued to be aired.

Elvin Santos (the Liberal Party candidate) is trying to be get elected by being friendly with both Zelaya and Micheletti. "We may have profound political differences," Santos declared. "But that doesn't mean I can't hug any Honduran I want, as I did when I greeted President Micheletti, when I greeted President Zelaya."

Porfirio Lobo Sosa (candidate of the conservative National Party) has stated that there is no "constitutional crisis," but rather a regular scheduled election to be held. Lobo is ahead in the polls. He has condemned the suspension of civil liberties.

Honduras is a tiny nation, which has a population of only about 7.5 million people. It has held fairly democratic elections since the late 1980s, after two decades of military repression and political intervention. The history of Honduras—a country with an unemployment rate of almost 30%—is filled with civil wars (which took the lives of an estimated thirteen thousand citizens between 1892 and 1924) and elections often marked by fraud and military force, frequently followed by presidential dictatorship and domination of Congress. The derogatory name “The Banana Republic” was given to Honduras in the early twentieth century, after the United Fruit Company bought the country’s banana company, and began to exercise undue influence. Honduras became the world’s sole country whose primary export was bananas. To learn more about the political history of Honduras, see my book, Posters, Propaganda, and Persuasion in Election Campaigns Around the World and Through History.

Sources:BBCNews, "Q&A: Crisis in Honduras"; Jose de Cordoba, "Honduras Lurches Toward Crisis Over Election," Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2009; The Economist, "Zelaya Swaps Exile for Embassy," September 26, 2009, pp. 47-48; Rui Ferreira, "Profile: Honduras' Presidential Candidate Porfirio Lobo Sosa," PODER360^o, September 29, 2009; Blake Schmidt, "Honduras Candidate Says Crackdown May Undermine Vote (Update1)," Bloomberg.com, September 30, 2009; Mark Stevenson, "Honduran interim leader: No meeting with Zelaya," Associated Press, September 25, 2009.
 

German voters will elect a new parliament today, and German involvement in the war in Afghanistan is a key issue, along with the economy.

Germany, which has 4,200 troops in Afghanistan, recently bombed fuel tankers that had been stolen by the Taliban there, and civilians were killed in the attack. On Friday, an al-Qaida group, calling itself "The German," released a video with vague threats issued in retaliation for Germany's military presence in Afghanistan.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD) has called for an exit strategy from the conflict. German involvement in Afghanistan has been a contentious issue for years now. In fact, in 2005, Rolf Schwanitz, an SPD minister, issued a controversial poster, titled "She [Merkel] Would Have Sent Soldiers" (shown on the right), which featured a row of flag-draped coffins of American war dead.

Chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to remain in office, with her center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) garnering the most votes. The CDU (with the Bavarian Christian Social Union) is supported by about 35% in the latest polls, with its coalition partner, the pro-business Free Democrat Party (FDP), attracting 13% support. If these two parties fail to gain a majority of the votes, they will have to find a third partner or the CDU will try to continue the present coalition with the center-left SPD, which is polling around 25%. For pre-election poll results, click here. The rest of the vote will be divided mainly between the Green Party and socialistic Left Party (each with about 12%).

Posters for Merkel and her party are more sedate, showing her smiling along with her main slogan, "We have the strength." Perhaps the most controversial CDU poster, titled "We have more to offer," was issued by Vera Lengsfeld, with her own and Chancellor Merkel's cleavage prominent (also shown on the right). Several women's groups criticized the poster. However, the most important controversy—besides the war in Afghanistan—is whether or not to cut taxes and increase the budget deficits (favored by the CDU and FDP, and opposed by the SPD and others).

The Green Party also issued an attention-getting poster, titled “The only reason to vote black,” which showed a white woman's hands on a black woman's bottom. Some criticized this poster as racist, although the Greens stated that the color black was meant to symbolize the CDU and that the poster was intended to show support for same-sex partnerships.

To read about the the political history of Germany and its posters, including past provocative ones by the Green Party, see my book, Posters, Propaganda, and Persuasion in Election Campaigns Around the World and Through History.