Russian
influence looms over Germany’s election
Officials
fear a campaign of cyberattacks and misinformation.
By JANOSCH
DELCKER 12/19/16, 5:29 AM CET Updated 12/19/16, 6:54 AM CET
BERLIN — Long
before the CIA and FBI came to the public conclusion last week that
the Kremlin had interfered in the U.S. presidential election with the
aim of helping Donald Trump, a senior German intelligence official
told colleagues that Russia was interfering in German politics.
The federal security
agency had observed “active measures” from Russia to influence
public opinion, Thomas Haldenwang, the deputy president of the
domestic security agency BfV, warned senior German security officials
at a conference in Berlin in June.
The aim, Haldenwang
said, was “to influence public perception and opinion in our
country, to the detriment of the German government.”
With elections due
for next year, government officials now fear that Russian President
Vladimir Putin has trained his sights on Chancellor Angela Merkel,
one of the most visible critics of Russia’s involvement in Syria
and Ukraine, as the next target for a Kremlin misinformation
campaign.
During a press
conference earlier this month, Merkel, who will run for office again
next year, said that cyberattacks and a misinformation campaign
during the election were “possible.”
Konstantin von Notz,
the Green party’s spokesperson on internet policy in the German
parliament, was blunter. “There’s a real danger that the bitter
experience of the U.S. election could be repeated here,” he said.
A history of
cyberattacks
Already, there have
been several, apparently politically motivated cyberattacks. In
January 2015, a pro-Russian group hacked German parliament websites,
including Merkel’s, bringing them down during a visit of Ukraine’s
then-prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, in what the group said was
retaliation for German support of Kiev.
Later in the year,
news broke that a group identified as APT28 or Fancy Bear — the
group that also reportedly penetrated the networks of the Democratic
National Committee in the U.S. — had gained access to the servers
of the Bundestag, according to Germany’s Federal Office for
Information Security, and had been able to roam around undetected for
several months, collecting information.
“To
use Russia as a tool in an election campaign is something we hate …
It’s fake information” — Russian presidential
spokesman Dmitry Peskov
In the spring of
this year, hackers tried to gain access to Merkel’s Christian
Democratic Union (CDU). The party declined to comment on the damage
caused by the attack; however, a spokesperson confirmed that “in
the past, there have been repeated cyberattacks on us.”
By fall, there were
reports of another attack on the Bundestag, also suspected to be
originating with APT28, which was fended off before they could access
servers, according to the Bundestag.
German officials,
including the MP von Notz, are doubtful about media reports that the
Bundestag files released by WikiLeaks earlier this month originated
from one of those attacks. The released files were a lot larger than
what the intruders in 2015 had gotten, according to official
estimates.
Officials, however,
are concerned that the hackers may be holding onto any potentially
damaging material to release it close to the election for maximum
disruption.
The head of the
federal security agency, Hans-Georg Maaßen, said earlier this month
that “information obtained through cyberattacks could emerge in the
election campaign to discredit German politicians.”
The Russian Foreign
Ministry in Moscow did not reply to a request for comment by
POLITICO. Russian officials have denied that Moscow interfered in the
U.S. election and was planning to do the same in Germany.
“It’s nonsense,”
said Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Russia Today
last week. “To use Russia as a tool in an election campaign is
something we hate … It’s fake information.”
German authorities
have signaled that they’re observing the Russians closely. But they
are clearly concerned that Moscow could mobilize a wide network of
pro-Kremlin allies to spread misinformation.
A broad campaign of
misinformation and leaks of stolen information, observers say, could
be used to weaken trust in government institutions and strengthen
pro-Russian, anti-establishment parties such as The Left (Die Linke)
on the far Left, and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
A circle of friends
Germans are divided
in their views on Russia. In a survey this spring, 53 percent of
respondents in the west of the country said they see Russia as a
threat compared to 33 percent in the formerly Communist east.
Russians, for their
part, have historically seen Germany as a partner with which to
divide up control over Central Europe, and not an adversary. And
during the Cold War, of course, Moscow controlled the east of Germany
until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when Putin, who is fluent
in German, was stationed in Dresden as a KGB officer.
Since then, the
Kremlin has leveraged its power in other ways, building up a network
of influencers, including former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder who,
weeks after leaving office in 2005, joined the board of pipeline
consortium Nord Stream, becoming a lobbyist for Russian energy
interests in Berlin. (The CEO of Nord Stream is Matthias Warnig, a
former Stasi officer, who is reported to have worked with Putin in
Dresden, though Warnig denies this.)
Another high-profile
ex-politician with ties to Russia is former state premier Matthias
Platzeck, who chairs the German-Russian Forum, a lobbying group, and
who in 2014 urged the West to recognize Russia’s annexation of
Crimea.
Both are members of
Germany’s second-largest party, the Social Democrats (SPD).
Currently part of Merkel’s “grand coalition,” the SPD will
challenge her for the chancellorship next year.
Like much of the
rest of his party, SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel, the deputy chancellor
and economy minister, also favors a much friendlier approach to the
Kremlin, and the party has spoken out in favor of relaxing the
economic sanctions on Russia, unlike Merkel, who wants to extend
them.
“The
influence of Russian foreign media outlets and their activity on
social networks has increased — and it’s crucial” —
Stefan Meister, German Council on Foreign Relations
Like elsewhere in
Europe, anti-establishment parties have sprung up in Germany in
recent years, and as trust in the government erodes, Moscow’s star
shines brighter. The anti-Islam movement Pegida, for example, touts
Moscow as an alternative to the poles of Washington and Brussels.
“In growing
segments of the German population, people have this vaguely positive
image of the Russians as people who stand up to the political
mainstream, to the U.S.,” said Stefan Meister of the German Council
on Foreign Relations, a think tank.
It’s not just
covert campaigns such as cyberattacks that concern German officials,
Meister said, but also overt attempts to influence the public debate
in the country.
“When it comes to
Russian attempts to steer public opinion in Germany, the influence of
Russian foreign media outlets and their activity on social networks
has increased — and it’s crucial.”
A wide range of
tools and instruments
Russia began
escalating its information efforts in Europe after the annexation of
Crimea in 2014, said a report from the European Parliament in 2016,
describing Moscow’s aim as “to distort the truth, incite fear,
provoke doubt and divide the EU.”
In the same time
period, according to German security officials, there has since been
an increase in Russian-funded media coverage criticizing the German
government. In 2014, the Russian state-funded broadcasting service
Russia Today launched a German-language website and a YouTube channel
called RT Deutsch. The Russian state-controlled news agency Rossiya
Segodnya has also started news website called Sputnik, which includes
German among its 30 languages.
Both RT and Sputnik
are decidedly pro-Russian and go out of their way to provide what
they say is a counterpoint to Western propaganda.
The Kremlin employs
“a wide range of tools and instruments,” including think tanks,
television stations such as Russia Today, “pseudo news agencies,”
multimedia services such as Sputnik as well as social media and
internet trolls, said the report from the European Parliament.
The report also
suggested that, in addition to funding pro-Russian media outlets,
Moscow is involved in deliberately spreading “fake news” in
comment sections and elsewhere on the web.
The case of Lisa
“Lisa” was the
alias of a 13-year-old girl, the daughter of two German-Russians in
Berlin, who said she had been kidnapped for 30 hours and raped by
migrants. After the claims were reported by Russian media in January,
Moscow accused Berlin of “sweeping problems under the rug” and
thousands of people in Germany took to the streets, protesting the
alleged cover-up.
Peskov, Putin’s
spokesman, later denied that the Kremlin had sought to use the rape
case to stir up tensions around immigration in Germany. But by the
time a German police investigation concluded that “Lisa” had lied
and there had been no rape, public trust in the political
institutions had already been damaged.
At the Berlin
conference in June, Emily Haber, one of the highest-ranking civil
servants in the interior ministry, called the “Lisa” case an
“effective” campaign that had polarized Germans, showing she
said, “the limits of what the state can do against disinformation.”
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