This Sunday, Germany goes to the polls and, to be honest, it’s quite difficult to believe. In fact, I don’t really think most Germans have got their heads round it at all; the government out here seems to have handled the recession well, what few policy discussions there are seem to run along relatively uncontroversial, un-ideological lines, and everyone is pretty convinced that Angela Merkel will remain chancellor at the end of it anyway.

In fact, if it weren’t for the hundreds of thousands of political posters crowding streets and billboards all across the sixteen federal states, you might be forgiven for thinking that even the politicians have forgotten the election.

Then again, they too have an air of nonchalance about them that makes you wonder if the parties all kind of came to the conclusion that, since the election is garnering such little attention, and since Merkel is going to win it anyway, it isn’t worth spending money on advertising consultants or campaign advisors.

After all, for your average Brit, used to slick sloganeering from the likes of Saatchi and Saatchi at election time, the German posters make a remarkably amateurish impression.

Now, one might expect nothing more of the Greens who, as was revealed in press this week, garnered the grand total of zero – yep, that’s zero – Euros in political donations last year; and their effort in my part of Hamburg is indeed remarkably lackadaisical. “Krista Sager: Constituency MP for Eimsbüttel!” read the first two lines. The small print, far from disguising the really controversial bit as it so often does, simply tells people to give the Greens both of their two – yep, that’s two – votes (FYI: Germans don’t just like generous portions when it comes to sausages and beer, but in acts of democratic representation, too).

Precisely why I should give her both votes however – protection for our planet, presumably – isn’t mentioned once.

As broke as the Green party in terms of donation funds from big business is, unsurprisingly, Die Linke, the former far left of the Social Democratic Party that broke away in the early 2000’s and, integrating the odd unreconstructed communist from the former East, declared war on post-modern capitalism as we know it. This lack of funds might explain the lack of words on their poster, with the headline barely coming in at three words even in the lengthiest of conceivable English translations: “Gregor is coming!” What he’s coming to do, they don’t say – to hold a speech about the evils of our moribund Western capitalist society, one assumes. Mind you, five out of the barely twenty words on this poster are advertising “Music by Mellow Mark”, so perhaps there will be no speech after all.

This would, admittedly, be odd for Gregor Gysi, whose rhetorical skills have formed a field of research for several doctorate students in the discipline; but then again, as I said, there isn’t really much policy discussion going on at the moment.

Even Germany’s largest party, the party that has spent the most time in power since the Second World War, the party that is currently nominally the senior partner in government and who expects to continue to be so next week, is not willing to tell us what it’s about. The slogan on this exceptionally prominent – and therefore obscenely expensive – CDU poster is the somewhat flat “We vote for confidence”. Who “we” is supposed to be is not quite clear, although they presumably don’t just mean themselves for choosing Angela Merkel, and would like the voters to choose her too. This, however, works on the assumption that one associates Merkel with confidence and not some other attribute . It does seem quite bizarre to ask for a vote without even a whisper of what that vote is going to be used to achieve.

On this basis, one might join several prominent German journalists and writers in condemning this and several other CDU posters as completely lacking in content. Then again, whilst not containing much by way of concrete political intentions, they do convey one important thing: the CDU is convinced that it is going to win. After all, the choice of words is telling – not the imperative “Vote for confidence” – i.e., we need your vote, but the enactive, presumptive “we vote for confidence” – i.e. you can do what you like, matey, but we’ve made our decision and that’s the important bit.