Germany’s upcoming election sits at the centre of a global propaganda battle

Russia’s rulers are trying hard to influence decisions in Germany, writes Patrick Maynard in Berlin, but they’re not the only ones using dishonest tactics on the global stage

German Green candidate Annalena Baerbock (REUTERS POOL)

In early May, Annalena Baerbock was a rising political star in the EU’s most powerful member state. As the new leading figure of the German Green party, she was the main candidate for a political organisation that had gone from being a fringe player to having a shot at the federal government’s leadership.

“Could Green Party leader Annalena Baerbock become Germany’s next Angela Merkel?” Deutsche Welle, the German state-owned broadcaster, cooed. “Annalena Baerbock: Woman who could be Germany’s next chancellor,” the BBC proclaimed. With the federal election coming up in September, it seemed the position was Ms Baerbock’s to lose.

Then the hashtags started.

By mid-May, #baerbockverhindern (Stop Baerbock) was trending on Twitter. Since then, related tags that have done well in Germany have included #GrueneVerhindern, #baerbockfail and #Lebenslauf, a reference to exaggerated items on the candidate’s resume.

Ms Baerbock has also been accused of plagiarising passages in a book she wrote. She has hired a libel lawyer to defend her.

The negative attention has tanked support for the Greens in the polls and could impact the 26 September election that will determine not only a new chancellor to replace Angela Merkel, who has ruled since 2005, and membership in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, but also the leadership of three federal states.

In most other countries, this type of Twitter blowback might be considered typical political snark.

But Germany was recently found by a European watchdog to have received more attention from Russian propaganda farms than any other EU member state. And in a country where the Greens’ rise threatens a controversial gas pipeline deal between Berlin and Moscow, the swift, negative reaction to Ms Baerbock’s ascension has some Kremlin watchers suspecting the use of online sock puppets and other forms of manipulation.

“The Greens are the most critical and hard-line party in Germany,” Gustav Gressel, a senior policy fellow at the European Center for Foreign Relations, told the Independent via email. “Business interests and corruption - like with Azerbaijan - will always blunt the sword of the CDU (Christian Democratic Union), and the (Social Democratic Party) SPD is cultivated anyway. So [the Greens] are the biggest threat [to Russia].”

“On top of that, I guess some of the more paranoid Russian intelligence officers really believe that the Greens would adopt a regime-change policy for Russia.”

Mr Gressel says that in the 1990s, when all German political parties started to develop ties to Russian society, the Greens contacted environmental and civil rights groups in Russia and Eastern Europe. “Most of these groups in Russia have been pushed into opposition, abolished, or are considered hostile entities,” Mr Gressel said.

On a variety of issues, from the planned Nord Stream 2 pipeline to policies regarding immigration, vaccination, Belarus and Ukraine, experts say the Russian government uses techniques well beyond just promoting hashtags, with state media assets often used to influence opinion both at home and abroad using doublespeak and misinformation.

Both sides of the mouth

Doublespeak commonly involves having the Russian-language versions of state media emphasise one set of stories, while versions in other languages tailor their messages and narratives to their specific audiences with other stories, experts say.

For example, the group EU vs Disinformation, which tracks Russian propaganda, cites Russian-language media depicting a Germany full of Russophobes, including insinuations that German authorities kidnap Russian children and give them to paedophiles. Similar allegations were often omitted from German-language versions of Russian media, the group found.

Mr Gressel says doublespeak is not particularly Russian in nature, but he says the Russian government has not been shy about using the tactic in the German-speaking world. He cites an example from 2010 when Heinz-Christian Strache, an Austrian politician from the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), visited Israel.

The Latin American media environment was very anti-Israel, Mr Gressel says, “so [Russian propaganda outlet] RT Spanish wrote that the reception of an Austrian right-winger in Israel is a sign that the country is complicit with Nazism and should not lecture others on historical guilt”.

“In the German media environment, however, Russia wants to promote the FPO because the party’s very pro-Russian. So RT covered Strache’s visit very positively, saying that the ‘Nazi-hoax’ was an unjust accusation by rivals that want to keep the FPO from power.”

Along with doublespeak, outright misinformation can be spread via a network of websites with serious-sounding names like Courrier Parisien in France or Abendlich Hamburg in Germany, says Jorg Kopke, head of communication at the Centre for European Policy in Freiburg and Berlin.

An atmosphere of tension

Russia’s relationship with Germany is arguably not as fraught as its interactions with the United States, with which it has exchanged tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats for several years and which once accused Russian security forces of rearranging diplomats’ home furniture as an intimidation tactic.

Even as Germany has historically maintained a warmer relationship with Russia than some of its Western counterparts, that relationship has shown signs of fraying in recent years.

Over the last half-decade, Moscow has been fingered as the likely source of several hacking attempts against the German government, starting with a cyberattack on the Bundestag in 2015.

A few years later, in 2019, a Georgian man of Chechen ethnicity named Zelimkhan Khangoshvili was killed in a Berlin park. According to a federal spokesperson, the trial of Mr Khangoshvili’s alleged killer - a Russian citizen accused of working for the Kremlin - started in 2020 and is ongoing, according to a federal spokesperson.

Berlin also became a flashpoint in East-West relations last year when Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny was taken to a hospital in the city after apparent poisoning via the Novichok nerve agent, which was popular with the Soviet government.

While Mr Navalny is a divisive character, Western critics have used his persecution as evidence of Russia’s totalitarian nature. The Russian government, for its part, has accused Germany of using Navaly’s German stay as part of its own propaganda effort.

This summer, German federal officials arrested a Russian man identified by German media as Ilnur Nagaev on accusations of spying.

Another man -- a retired political scientist known to the German public only as Klaus L. -- was charged this week with spying for Russia.

Mr Nagaev - an engineer at a university in the southern city of Augsburg - was said to be handing over information to Russian officials for cash.

Regardless of any stresses, the Moscow-Berlin relationship may be bearing, Russian leaders aren’t the only ones with reason to use questionable tactics in influencing public opinion.

There is also an incentive for some Western governments to prevent a Green win in Germany, which is “the only major and credible democratic nation that has routinely challenged the US-led Anglosphere’s surveillance regime to any notable degree,” according to Barrett Brown.

Mr Brown founded Project PM, a crowd-sourced research project tracking influence campaigns and tactics using data stolen from governments and private intelligence firms.

He asserts that the United States and its partners have a strong interest in avoiding a German government headed by the Green party, which is likely to push against hegemony by the US and its partners more than competing parties.

A set of documents reported on in 2011 show that a California company was setting up extensive persona-management capabilities for the US government at that time, though details about the development of similar technology have been less forthcoming since then.

Mr Brown believes that online influence and disinformation campaigns by Russia, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China and other actors have become significantly more advanced. That potentially includes technologies like GPT-3 and StyleGAN2, which allow realistic generation of essays, nonexistent faces and video.