It is not the first time that Russia has tried to influence an election through disinformation. It happened last year, both ahead of the EU elections and the US election. According to the German Bundestag, Russia had even already tried to influence voters’ opinions in the German federal elections of 2021.
The situation has not changed much four years later. Experts have observed large-scale Russian disinformation campaigns ahead of the upcoming German election on February 23.
The campaigns are intended particularly to discredit centrist parties, with most fake news being “directed against the Greens, the CDU (Christian Democrats) and the SPD (Social Democrats, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s party) as well as their top candidates,” said Lea Frühwirth from Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (CeMAS), which works on the topics of conspiracy ideologies, disinformation, antisemitism and right-wing extremism.
“There are few mentions of the AfD (Alternative for Germany), but these are positive,” Frühwirth told DW.
Top candidates targeted by fake news
Here are two recent examples: Since the beginning of February, several X users have posted a video about the alleged mental breakdown of top CDU candidate Friedrich Merz. It asserts that he tried to take his own life in 2017. One of the posts was viewed more than 5.4 million times in 10 days.
The supposed proof for this is a statement by an alleged psychiatrist named Albert Mertens and a medical form. The stamp on the form describes Mertens as a “psychological psychotherapist.”
In Germany, as elsewhere, the jobs of psychotherapist and psychiatrist are different. The Federal Chamber of Psychotherapists told DW that there was no “Albert Mertens” registered in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It added that there was no practice registered at the address given in the document that would be authorized to issue such forms.
The video was originally published on the “Wochenüberblick aus München” (“Weekly overview from Munich”) website. An important detail is that when users share the video, they repeatedly point out that Merz has called for Taurus missiles to be supplied to Ukraine, a hot-button issue in Germany regarding how to support Ukraine in the war with Russia.
The Greens’ top candidate Robert Habeck and his party colleague Claudia Roth have also been the victims of disinformation recently. According to an article and video published on the website “Narrativ,” the two are allegedly implicated in a €100 million corruption scandal involving several paintings from the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation that ended up in Ukraine and were then sold to private collectors. The foundation told DW that all the allegations were false.
Storm-1516, Doppelgänger and Matryoshka operations
What these allegations have in common is that they are produced in a similar fashion with fake witness statements and forged documents. They are then published on websites that look like news platforms but where disinformation is spread. A team member of gnida project, a group of online researchers that explores the phenomenon, told DW that the approach was typical of the Russian disinformation operation Storm-1516.
Working with the Correctiv and NewsGuard platforms, the gnida project discovered more than a hundred German-language websites that initially were filled with AI-generated, pro-Russian content. The websites were then used to publish false reports, which are disseminated on social media platforms such as X or Telegram by “friends” or paid influencers.
The Doppelgänger operation works similarly. Ever since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it has spread “pro-Russian narratives and disinformation aimed particularly at discrediting Western foreign policy generally and in particular support for Ukraine,” the German foreign ministry writes. The US government imposed sanctions on Doppelgänger stakeholders after the operation’s interference in the US election campaign last year.
The operation’s name came from the fact that it originally imitated the websites and output, such as videos, of well-known media outlets like the BBC and DW.
Some of the fake sites and videos are easy to identify, but Frühwirth from CeMAS told the German broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) that it was a question of “mass rather than class.”
Another such operation called Matryoshka uses an army of bots to launch “distraction maneuvers.” Journalists are inundated with details about fake news and asked to check them. This helps to spread false claims as well as to “block” fact checkers from doing their work, said French news agency AFP.
According to the independent Russian media outlet Agentstvo, Matryoshka bots spread at least 15 fake videos at the end of January that looked as if they had been made by DW and the German daily tabloid Bild. The videos, which were in English, French and Spanish, reported that Germany was allegedly struggling with the threat of terrorism, the rise in crime and the fear of the voters ahead of the elections.
Russian support for AfD and BSW
Leonie Pfaller from NewsGuard, which provides tools to counter misinformation, told BR that Russia’s goals were largely “to spread uncertainty and polarize voters.” She added that it was conspicuous that there was frequent positive reporting about the far-right AfD and its top candidate Alice Weidel.
Research revealed that as early as the beginning of 2024, the Doppelgänger operation aimed to increase the AfD’s share of the vote to at least 20%. This is exactly where the AfD currently lies according to the polls. It cannot be proven that there is a connection.
Pfaller suspected that the AfD was receiving support from Russia because the party was more friendly towards Moscow than other German parties. In its manifesto, the AfD calls for the lifting of economic sanctions against Russia, which the far-right party has not condemned for the war in Ukraine.
Frühwirth from CeMAS pointed out that the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) had also been boosted by Russian propaganda. It has described the war in Ukraine as a “proxy war” between the US and Russia that could have been avoided. It would like Germany to resume buying natural gas from Russia.
Felix Kartte from Stiftung Mercator, a private foundation that fosters the sciences and the humanities, believed that the disinformation surrounding the German elections was less of a threat than Russia’s long-term strategy.
“The topics, the narratives that the Kremlin has wanted to control for years have become very dominant in the German public debate too,” he told DW.
The claims that all governments in Europe are corrupt and that they suppress freedom of expression, for example, are narratives that far-right parties in Europe are also spreading.
German foreign ministry wants to raise awareness
The spreading of disinformation “by foreign government agencies in Germany is generally not punishable by law,” the German Interior Ministry informed the Correctiv research center in response to an inquiry. But it said an interdepartmental working group had been set up to monitor threats such as disinformation.
The ministry told BR that the focus was on raising awareness of disinformation among the public and promoting news and media literacy in all age groups. Germany is also working with other states and social networks to combat Russian disinformation.
Kartte said that it is not enough to counter disinformation with facts and that politicians have to acknowledge the basic emotional needs of society. He believes they have to “make better policy.”
Andreas Wißkirchen contributed to this article, which is a collaborative project between ARD-faktenfinder, BR24 #Faktenfuchs and DW Fact check. It was originally written in German.