BERLIN: Germany is expecting Russia to try to influence its general election on Sept. 24, but there are no indications of which party it would seek to back, officials said.
Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said at a news conference that data stolen in 2015 in a hack of the lower house of parliament could surface in the coming weeks.
Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, said that while it was not known what Russia would do he suspected that Russian President Vladimir Putin would prefer a different German chancellor than Angela Merkel.
It was likely that Russia had sought to influence the US election and everything points to Moscow’s involvement in efforts to influence the election in France, said the official.
“As a result, it cannot be excluded — and we are preparing internally — that there will be a similar effort to influence the election in Germany,” he said.
Russia has denied trying to influence foreign elections.
Merkel, who backs continued sanctions against Russia for its actions toward Ukraine, is seeking a fourth term.
Sources have told Reuters that one of the dozen or so accounts hit in the 2015 Bundestag hack was Merkel’s parliamentary account, although her primary work account was not touched.
Tuesday’s comments come days before Putin arrives in Germany for a meeting of G-20 leaders, and follow a spate of cyberattacks directed at the German Parliament, individual lawmakers, political parties and think tanks affiliated with parties since summer 2015 — all of which German intelligence agencies blame on APT 28, a Russian hacker group with links to Moscow.
Russia denies it has been in any way involved in the cyberattacks.
Maassen said any campaign to influence the election could be more about unsettling German voters than promoting any particular candidate.
“It may not be aimed at strengthening one party or another, or ensuring that one or another person is elected to run the government, but that the trust in the functioning of our democracy is damaged,” he said.
Maassen also said the German electoral system — which is based on written rather than electronic votes — was less vulnerable to electronic manipulation than other systems.
Maassen said his agency had no reliable evidence that a cyberattack that started in Ukraine last week and spread around the world was carried out by Russia.
Ukraine has blamed Russian security services for the attack, which it said was aimed at destroying important data and spreading panic.
Maassen also warned that more terror attacks by extremists in Germany are likely.
He said that “further attacks by single persons or terror commando groups must be expected.”
De Maiziere told reporters some 680 extremists are considered potentially dangerous enough to carry out an attack.
Although Tunisian Anis Amri had been under surveillance, he was able to hijack a truck in December and drive it into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people and wounding dozens — the first mass-casualty Islamic extremist attack in Germany.
Maassen said 10,000 people in Germany are part of the radical scene but not all are violent.
Germany ‘expecting Russian effort to influence election’
Germany ‘expecting Russian effort to influence election’
