Author: Tim Beyer, Political scientist at the University of Applied Sciences for Public Service in Bavaria
Western democracies are under attack. This holds true not only for the state of Ukraine, which has to defend its pathway to democracy with guns and the lives of their soldiers, but also for every state in the EU, which has to deal with the effects of this war.
The most vulnerable time of a democracy comes around at the moment that should normally be the biggest value of it: election time.
On 23 February 2025, Germany held a snap election after the collapse of the so called “traffic light coalition” between the Social-Democrats (SPD), the liberal FDP and the Greens in November 2024. While this election was, in comparison with the normal federal elections in Germany, accompanied by a very short election campaign, this did not deter foreign powers from investing a lot resources into a full-fledged FIMI campaign in order to manipulate German voters to vote for parties aligned with the goals of the perpetrator.
Before, during and after the elections, several fake news articles appeared, first and foremost in social media that tried to sway the perception of the German population in a certain direction. While there were indeed a lot of internal fake news, this article focuses on the FIMI attacks from Russia, which at this point seem to have invested the most resources into the German elections.
102 fake websites were ready to launch
At the time of writing this article, the information network “Correctiv” had identified over 100 fake websites. All of them could be traced back to the known Russian troll network “Storm-1516”, which was already active in subverting the Paris Olympics in 2024. These websites, some of them already established by July 2024, mimicked the websites of known local and national newspapers in order to establish legitimacy.
Looking into these websites, one could find a variety of topics that had the main focus on emphasising existing fears in German society or undermining the legitimacy of top politicians from the mainstream parties. We will look at a few of these websites, at least, the ones still reachable, and analyse their content in light of the political debates in Germany during the times of the national election campaigns.
1.9 million Kenyan migrants
On 17 December 2024, a Kenyan website called Tuko published an article about the visit of then German Vice Chancellor and Economic Minister Robert Habeck to Kenya. Most of the article is true, since Robert Habeck did visit Kenya in December of 2024 and did discuss renewable energy and trade relations. However, the article becomes fake news in the last third of the article where it reads “In addition to trade and energy talks, Habeck’s visit also saw the signing of an expanded labor agreement between Germany and Kenya. […] the new agreement will see 1.9 million Kenyan workers travel to Germany to fill roles in industries facing acute labor shortages. It also provides faster employment-based pathway to naturalization for 750,000 workers.”
This part of the article was quickly shared and distributed on X and other social media platforms as it fed the existing fear of German voters about irregular and uncontrolled migration into Germany. In a survey by the Institute infratest dimap in December 2024, migration was rated as the second most important topic for German society. It was even rated before the issue of “armed conflict / peace / foreign policy”, which was ranked three in this survey.
Figure 1: “ARD-DeutschlandTREND Dezember 2024. Wichtigste Probleme“
Unsurprisingly this article went viral in Germany and started a heated debate about the so called “Überfremdung” (foreign infiltration) of German society. The surprising part of this campaign was that the website itself (Tuko) is indeed an established Kenyan news website, but the article itself was sponsored, meaning that someone paid for this content and the website obeyed happily. Investigations by “Corrective” found out that the same article was also published in a South African media called The South African. There, they managed to discover that the newspaper was paid 12.000 South African Rand (about €606) for publishing a series of articles.
Deepfake: Robert Habeck and the case of the school-girl of Brunsbüttel
In this FIMI incident, the new technology of Deep Fake was used to accuse the Green candidate for German Chancellor, Robert Habeck, of sexually harassing a schoolgirl in the north German city of Brunsbüttel. The video was posted on a fake website called “Echo der Zeit” on 5 December 2024 which claimed that the incident happened in 2017 when the girl was just 10 years old.
Just a day after the publishing of this fake news by this fake website, fact checkers in X already debunked the message.
Figure 2: Screenshot from X Smear campaign against Robert Habeck
The fact checkers used Google to reverse-search the image of the alleged victim and found out that the girl in the video lives in Russia and can be hired as an actress. Furthermore, the fact checkers pointed out, that the news website “Echo der Zeit” had only been online for 16 days before posting the article. Even though this deepfake was low quality, the German voice-over was easily recognisable as artificial and the grammar was completely off, some German influencers on X and other platforms shared the video as being true. Shortly after the debunking of this incident as fake, the site “Echo der Zeit” was taken offline and only an archived version can still be accessed.
Mass persecution of right-wing opposition in Germany
An article published by the “Foundation to Battle Injustice” shows that the campaign was already starting way ahead of the federal elections. It made unverified claims that Germany’s ruling coalition was planning the mass persecution of right-wing opposition, particularly targeting the AfD party. The article alleged that the government, under the pretext of fighting extremism, had developed a comprehensive plan to dismantle the AfD and other conservative movements. The supposed plan included media defamation campaigns labelling right-wing politicians as “Nazis” and “extremists,” legal measures to disqualify AfD candidates, increased surveillance of opposition figures, and coordinated efforts to pressure businesses into severing ties with AfD members. The article further claimed that dissenters face arbitrary arrests, heavy fines and even physical attacks, citing past incidents involving right-wing activists as evidence of state-sponsored repression. It also suggests that authorities, in collaboration with media and law enforcement agencies, intended to instill fear among opposition supporters to discourage them from political participation ahead of the 2025 elections.
Figure 3: Cover image – Germany plans mass persecution of right-wing opposition and massacre of conservative dissidents – Foundation to Battle injustice
The Foundation to battle Injustice is well known for being a pro-Kremlin website dedicated to spreading disinformation about western democracies to undermine their legitimacy. So, it comes as no surprise that the article framed the right-wing AfD as a victim of this assumed state-sponsored oppression, since the AfD in its current state is a strict pro-Russian party that would, if admitted into government, oppose any policy that could interfere with Russia’s global strategy. The AfD has since 2015 often posed as the victims of oppression by the mainstream parties in Germany and as if they have the solution to all problems, but the other parties and the government don´t want to listen to them – they only want to hear “woke” solutions.
Russian strategy in the federal elections
With these three examples of Russian intervention in the federal elections in Germany, a trend seemed to emerge. On the one hand, there seemed to be a clear target, as to which party and which politicians were attacked by these FIMI-campaigns; on the other hand, there was a distinct topic chosen by the attackers to deal the most damage to social coherence and to boost specific parties that could benefit Russian interests.
For the first trend, it seems that the “mastermind” behind the campaign decided that the Green party and especially its candidate for Chancellor, Robert Habeck, should be the main target. This correlated with the ongoing “natural” trend in Germany society, as the Greens were accused of being one of the main reasons for Germany’s industrial problems, inflation and rising energy prices and that Robert Habeck had been the federal minister of economics in the previous government. The second trend can be also linked to the Greens, as the party always pursued a more liberal migration policy. Therefore, fears and concerns of the German population, especially since the terrorist attacks by migrants had become more frequent, could be easily blamed on the policy of the Green party.
The motive of this seems clear: To provoke the German voters to cast their vote more on the issue of migration then towards the issue of the conflict with Russia. This correlates with the fact that two major parties who ran in the federal election – the right wing “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD) and the left wing “Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht” (BSW) – promoted a pro-Russian and anti-migration policy. If either of these two parties were to win enough votes, to either participate in the government or to block certain decisions, the German military aid for Ukraine or other eastern-European countries could have been drastically lowered.
Mission accomplished? Kind of…
While it is hard to evaluate just how much these FIMI-campaigns affected the result of the election, we can look at the election results and see if the intended goals of the attacker were achieved.
In the 2025 federal election, the AfD achieved 20,9% of the votes, more than doubling their result from 2021 when the party achieved 10,4%. The BSW achieved 4,9% and barely missed the threshold of 5% to enter parliament, if only by 13.000 votes. As the BSW didn´t run in the 2021 election, their result can also be considered a success. The Left Party, a party that cannot be directly linked as being pro-Russian but is very much anti-American and radical left, won nearly 4%. The parties of the former government coalition all lost compared to 2021 with the Green party losing 3% of the vote. Only the democratic, conservative CDU/CSU could win some percentages, while all other “mainstream parties” lost, strengthening the power of the radical parties (Fig. 6).
Figure 6: Results of the German federal election 2025
In the new federal parliament, the AfD and the Left Party will have together more than 33% of the seats. That means they could block the plan of CDU/CSU and SPD to change the constitution to spend billions for the German army, as these decisions need a threshold of 66%. Even if these two parties will not be part of the next government, they have the power to block decisions to change the constitution. Also, the fact, that the pro-Russian AfD now is the second strongest party in Germany seems to be a success for the Kremlin.
As the future seems uncertain for Germany, we can expect Russian FIMI attacks to continue trying to influence society. If no countermeasures are taken, Russian influence in Germany will continue to grow.