The German election year 2009 saw the first attempts by political parties to include web 2.0 services in their online campaigns. The 2009 election therefore, offers the opportunity to examine how political parties outside the USA—where online campaigning has become indispensible for candidates of both major parties—choose to use online tools in their campaigns. This paper examines the online campaign of the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) with a special focus on the campaign’s use of web 2.0 services. The different elements of the campaign will be discussed with regard to three basic functions of online campaigning provided by the relevant literature: 1) Presence in the online information space; 2) Support of the infrastructure of politics; 3) The staging of political support and participation.
