by Jastinder Khera and Johanna Lehn
As Germany heads for elections, its security services warn that Russia and its sympathizers may step up meddling and disinformation to boost extremist parties and sow doubt about the democratic process.
Following charges that Moscow interfered in recent elections in Moldova, Georgia and Romania, authorities in Berlin fear that the February 23 vote will also be a ripe target for pro-Russian propaganda.
Media investigations have pointed to Kremlin-linked efforts to support the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and boost the Russia-friendly views of the far-left Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW).
As the campaign gathers pace, Germany's interior ministry has set up a task force to take "the necessary protection measures" against any disinformation, sabotage, espionage and cyber-attacks.
"Targeted lies and defamation are part of the toolkit of Putin's propaganda apparatus," Interior Minister Nancy Faeser told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) newspaper.
As Germany and its NATO allies strongly back Ukraine in its fight against Russia's invasion, Germany's foreign intelligence chief Bruno Kahl has warned that "whether we like it or not, we are in a direct confrontation with Moscow".
Kahl said in October that so far in Germany "thankfully there has been no manipulation of the actual voting procedure such as attempts to influence the count" and noted that this would be difficult in Germany.
However, he said that Moscow had become adept at identifying socially divisive issues and then "heating them up", such as the Covid pandemic, climate change and Germany's economic woes.
Without naming names, Kahl said that "in this way extremes are strengthened and we see on the left and the right of the spectrum that lines from Moscow are sometimes naively parroted" by domestic actors in Germany.
A joint investigation by several German media outlets this year charged that a Russian propaganda agency was working to spread memes and narratives online to boost the AfD and undermine support for Ukraine.
The Social Design Agency (SDA) had been spreading disinformation in order to increase voters' "fear of the future" and raise voter support for the AfD to 20 percent, the media consortium reported in September.
The campaign was being "controlled directly from the Kremlin", according to the report by the SZ daily, public broadcasters NDR and WDR and other media.
According to the report, the SDA publishes memes and caricatures "around the clock on social networks" including Facebook, Instagram, X and Telegram.
One internal SDA directive was to spread the narrative that German support for Ukraine is to blame for the "deepest economic and social crisis in recent history", the SZ said.
The daily quoted Germany's domestic intelligence chief Thomas Haldenwang as saying his organization was working hard "to identify the destructive actors and prevent them from destabilizing our democracy".
The SDA is also suspected of involvement in the so-called "Doppelgaenger" campaign, in which fake articles mimicking the style and layout of major German news outlets are spread in support of pro-Russian narratives.
Germany has also seen a proliferation of claims spread online that seek to undermine trust in the voting process itself.
During June's European elections, AFP fact-checked a claim that a small hole in the corners of ballot papers made them invalid. The hole is actually there to aid blind people to vote using a special stencil.
One post, viewed thousands of times on Telegram, was from a channel that regularly relays pro-Kremlin messaging.
Many suspicious online items have centered on divisive debates around climate change and targeted Germany's left-leaning Greens party, who are also the declared political enemy of the AfD.
While much disinformation on the topic is home-grown, the non-profit group Climate Action Against Disinformation said official Russian media accounts -- including those posting in German -- seek to "amplify tensions".
Leading Greens politicians have been smeared by defamatory articles and AI-manipulated videos falsely accusing them of scandals and criminality.
German news site t-online has reported that the claims had been carefully planted via a mix of YouTube videos, "sponsored" articles in overseas media, and made-up German news sites.
The links from these "disinformation portals" were then spread by pro-Moscow accounts on social platform X in an "info-laundering" process that the report described as a modern version of Cold War-era KGB practices.
Greens lawmaker and security expert Konstantin von Notz warned last week that "the use of AI-generated disinformation such as deepfakes has long been a serious security policy problem".
© Agence France-Presse