Here Are Just a Few of Russia’s Dirty Tricks Going Into Germany’s Elections

As the federal elections approach, many in Germany wonder what surprises Moscow is preparing for Mutti, or Mommy, as many of Germans call Chancellor Angela Merkel, whether with affection or with irony.

کد خبر: ۷۳۱۵۰۲

تاریخ: ۲۸ شهريور ۱۳۹۶ - ۰۸:۵۲

As the federal elections approach, many in Germany wonder what surprises Moscow is preparing for Mutti, or Mommy, as many of Germans call Chancellor Angela Merkel, whether with affection or with irony. Liberals around the globe see the 63-year-old German leader as one of the world’s best hopes at a moment of faltering U.S. leadership. And for precisely that reason, as German officials in the Bundestag told The Daily Beast, they are expecting some "Russian surprises” in the last few days before election day on Sept. 24.

One of the Bundestag’s leading experts on foreign affairs, Niels Annen, said Berlin has been watching Russia’s efforts to shake up, discredit, and mock German institutions and European values for at least the past three years.

"Russian hackers attacked us at the Bundestag in 2015 but no data stolen from Merkel and other officials has been released, so far,” Annen told The Daily Beast. "And although we have heard Russian Foreign Minister [Sergei] Lavrov, Russian President [Vladimir] Putin and PM [Dmitry] Medvedev saying that the Kremlin had no intentions to intervene in our elections, I am not so naïve as to believe that it means anything; we try to prepare ourselves for any development.”

Moscow’s attempts to inflame and exploit the emotions of some 4 million Russian-speaking German citizens have been obvious.

Victor Bashkatov, a 35-year-old politician, was astonished to see a crowd of far-right and Russian-German citizens protesting outside his office in the Bundestag last year. Hundreds of people came out on that chilly gray day with banners in Russian and German, furious about immigrants allegedly kidnapping and raping a 13-year-old girl—protesters demanded an investigation into the crime against "our Russian girl.”

The older generation of German citizens from former Soviet countries tend to watch Kremlin-controlled TV channels, and the story about "Lisa,” the little girl, eventually turned out to be fake. She had run away from home, stayed with an older male friend, and made up the story. But it inspired many of the Russian-speaking Germans to support the far-right populist party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which often is compared to France’s xenophobic National Front or Geert Wilders’ anti-Muslim movement in the Netherlands.

Hundreds of Russian-speaking German citizens—immigrants from former Soviet states and strong critics of European democracy—have joined the AfD in the past three years, including several Russian employees working at the AfD’s Berlin headquarters.