By Sarah Marsh
BERLIN (Reuters) – A Russian disinformation campaign is seeking to boost the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), undermine mainstream German parties and sow worries about the economy ahead of the country’s Feb. 23 election, a think-tank has found.
German think-tank CeMAS said it had tracked down hundreds of German-language posts on social media platform X over the past month exhibiting what it said were typical patterns of Russia’s Doppelgaenger disinformation campaign against the West that German, U.S. and French authorities have previously denounced.
The campaign, created after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine to undermine Western support for Kyiv, spreads links to falsified Western news outlets sharing false information, according to a German foreign ministry report published last June.
Russia has consistently denied involvement in disinformation campaigns against the West.
In recent weeks, the German posts on X have blamed the Greens party for Germany’s economic woes, lambasted Chancellor Olaf Scholz for his support of Ukraine, cast the conservatives as untrustworthy but spoken in favour of the AfD, CeMAS said.
The posts it tracked have shared links to falsified German news websites or to articles on authentic ones supporting their narrative, or simply images. Amplified by networks of fake accounts, they have received over 2.8 million views, CeMAS said.
The report comes a month ahead of the election which Germany’s main opposition conservatives are expected to win. However the strength of the AfD, polling in second place, could make the arithmetic of forming a coalition – and governance in general – more difficult if it can swing a blocking minority.
MUSK FACTOR
In December the anti-immigration AfD won the endorsement of X owner Elon Musk, who this month also hosted a live chat with the party’s chancellor candidate Alice Weidel on his platform.
A survey published on Saturday by pollster INSA put the conservatives on 29% and the AfD on 21% – twice what it achieved in the 2021 election. Scholz’s Social Democrats were trailing in third place on 16% and the Greens on 13%.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV) said in November it had set up a task force to head off any foreign state attempts to influence the federal election.
Germany is Ukraine’s second biggest financial and military backer, seeking to help it fend off Russia’s full-scale invasion that began nearly three years ago.
This has resulted in a sharp rise in “aggressive behaviour” by Moscow towards Germany and other Ukraine allies, the BfV said.
The U.S. Justice Department said last year that the Russian Doppelganger operation is orchestrated by the Russian government through a group of Russian marketing agencies.
(Reporting by Sarah Marsh; Editing by Friederike Heine and Gareth Jones)
