German Tory Boy loses out at polls but wins media stardom

Christian Democrat 'Don Quixote' becomes unwitting comedy hero of film and press

In Britain the phenomenon of the Tory Boy – a pimply pamphlet-writer who worshipped the ground Margaret Thatcher strode upon – went out when she left Downing Street. In Germany they are only just discovering his type.

One of the most popular films here this Easter is Herr Wichmann von der CDU (Mr Wichmann of the Christian Democrats), a Louis Theroux-style documentary about a German Tory Boy's failed attempt to get elected in an east German socialist stronghold.

Henryk Wichmann, the 25-year-old CDU parliamentary candidate for Uckermarkt, a constituency in the economically beleaguered state of Brandenburg just east of Berlin, is an Alan Partridge lookalike who joined the party at 16, met his fiancée at a German Young Conservatives barbecue and is fond of tweed jackets and Earl Grey.

He also has a crush on the CDU chairwoman, Angela Merkel, and dislikes immigrants ("only the ones who come over here and exploit our welfare system, mind"). And, clearly not knowing any better, he let the cult east German film director, Andreas Dresen, trail him with a camera during last September's general election campaign.

The left-wing Mr Dresen's films focus on the fallout in east Germany after reunification, but all have a sense of humour. Mr Wichmann, a Berlin law student, gave him plenty of material. "I found it interesting to follow a CDU candidate – someone who clearly didn't have a chance," he said.

Yet the award-winning director, whose last hit film, Halbe Treppe (Grill Point), was made in a bleak city on the Polish border, also wanted to show the socio-economic problems in east Germany, where one in five is jobless and xenophobic attacks are constantly in the headlines.

"In some towns, huge swaths of apartment blocks are being knocked down," he says. "The young think they have a better chance in the west, and just leave. They're becoming ghost towns, people just don't want to live there any more."

Despite sinking €30,000 (£21,000) of his own money into his populist campaign, it was a hopeless battle for the thick-skinned Mr Wichmann, dubbed "Don Quixote" and "Sisyphus" by the German media. The Uckermarkt electorate is split between elderly Communist nostalgics and disillusioned youths who fall prey to the extreme-right Republikaner party. After weeks of complaints at the size of rival candidates' posters (they were bigger) and a local Green party obsession with endangered frogs, he increased the CDU vote by a feeble 1 per cent.

Yet if Henryk Wichmann failed in his campaign to represent Uckermarkt, the film has given him a media profile. He now has a newspaper column, "What Herr Wichmann says", and Bild, the German equivalent of the Sun, has done a Hello!-style "Wichmann at home" photo spread.

He says he's not bothered by the cinemas full of smirking Germans. "I think they're laughing with me, not at me, aren't they?" he says. "If I were the sensitive type, I wouldn't be in politics, would I?"

But Henryk, who knew at an early age that he wanted to be a politician, denies ambitions to be Chancellor. "It would be enough to be engaged in local politics," he says at the posh Unter den Linden café where we meet, though you can see in his eyes that he doesn't mean it. And he has never heard of William Hague.