© Tobias Schwarz / Reuters
With exactly three weeks to go before the German parliamentary election, the authorities are apparently looking for a boogeyman, as they claim, without evidence, that Russia could interfere in the voting process.
As Germany gears up for the next federal parliamentary election, the authorities are looking at potential threats to the democratic process. The latest polls conducted by German public broadcasters show German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leading by a wide margin, with a 15-percent lead over its closest competitors - the Social Democrats.
However, government security officials have already called the legitimacy of the election into question, saying that Russia could influence it in a number of ways."We believe that Russia is capable of starting disinformation campaigns in connection with the elections to the Bundestag [the Lower House of the German parliament]," the head of the German state security agency (BfV), Hans-Georg Maassen, told
Die Welt daily just one month before the election.
Maasen admitted, however, that it is "almost impossible for the intelligence services to find irrefutable evidence that Russia, for example, was behind the cyber-attacks on the Bundestag," but that his service still believes "it is very likely."
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