The Internet may be an unknown world for many of Germany's politicians, but it's one they're increasingly willing to brave to woo prospective voters.
Local legislators and even some national political celebrities, such as Liberal Party General Secretary Guido Westerwelle, have poked their heads into chat rooms to get in touch with supporters as the country's general election heats up for its grand finale on 27 September.
On Friday, it's Chancellor Helmut Kohl's turn to enter the arena. Kohl, a conservative who once confused the information superhighway with the real-life autobahns, will make his online debut at his party's Web site at 6 am (EST).
"He will be sitting here [at party headquarters], and two secretaries will be typing his answers," said Susanne Lang, the Christian Democrat party official in charge of the Web site. Thanks to his sons, Kohl has developed his own interest in the Net, and was more than agreeable to the chat, Lang said.
The embattled Christian Democrats, who are trailing the Social Democrats by 3 to 5 percent in the latest opinion polls, are even running television commercials to promote the online event. The party was hoping the ads would have a positive effect on Kohl's image, Lang said.
Kohl's challenger, Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder, will not make a live online appearance, an interesting twist, considering that some pundits see Kohl as a man of the past and Schröder as the candidate for the future.
"What can you seriously do with a chat that lasts [only] one hour?" said Michael Jürdens, an official of the Schröder camp. "We don't have to stage such an event to show that we're ready for the future," he said. Schröder has always been accessible to voters via email, he added, which should be sufficient.
The controversy shows that German politicians are still unsure of how much attention to pay to the Internet, which was in its infancy during the last general elections four years ago.
According to Holger Maaß of Hamburg-based Internet research firm Fittkau & Maaß, between 6 and 7 million Germans regularly go online, hardly a significant number in a country of 81 million people. "The first steps have been taken, but the Internet is one medium among many, and it doesn't have that much of an influence on the course of the campaign," Maaß said.
Several Web sites have sprung up trying to get the fun-loving cybercrowd interested in politics.
At Wahl$treet for example, surfers can buy shares of their favorite party and trade them like shares on Wall Street -- the stock price reflecting each party's popularity.
While many other political sites specialize in providing general background information, the most popular of the bunch, Wahlkampf98, cleverly combines facts and fun.
The brainchild of Peer-Arne Böttcher and Lars Hinrichs, two tech-savvy 21-year-olds from Hamburg, Wahlkampf98 is designed to be a political cyberhub offering news, polls, links, chats, such as the one with Westerwelle, and the occasional game for comic relief.
The "phrase thrasher" function, which generates and satirizes the hackneyed style of many political speeches, has become the site's most popular feature. Since it was introduced in July, surfers have created about 60,000 speeches.
Wahlkampf98, which was launched in February, has rapidly attracted traffic that now reaches 8 million hits a month, Böttcher said. "We saw the election coming and we were determined to show that we could pull off something like this on the Web."
It was no easy feat for Böttcher and Hinrichs, who were turned down by every political party and media company they contacted.
Only when they got the backing of Hamburg Web-design firm netwhere -- which spotted a great opportunity for self-promotion -- did the project grow wings.
Soon after, the two caught the attention of Spiegel Online, a unit of the leading German newsmagazine. "These guys approached politicians and told them that the Net had an important role to play. And they did it in a way that we couldn't," said Ulrich Booms, an editor for Spiegel Online.
With the prestigious magazine aboard, others fell in line. Today there is no large publication and only a few TV and radio stations that don't supply articles, audio files, or video clips to the site.
"Many people see this as the most innovative campaign-related offer available," said Kay Knoche, European technical manager of RealNetworks. The company recently supported Wahlkampf98 with streaming technology for live audio and video broadcasts.
Now that the venture has put Böttcher and Hinrichs on the map, they've registered another domain, politik-digital.de, for a follow-up project -- an online magazine covering Net politics in general.
Although the model has proven a tough sell financially, even in the United States, Böttcher is confident they can pull it off a second time. "Just look at the recent child-pornography arrests," he said. "There will always be stories to report about digital politics and plenty of readers interested in them."
