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Germany’s shaky grand coalition government has survived its latest crisis. In the quarrel about the future of Hans-Georg Maassen, head of the German domestic intelligence service, Chancellor Angela Merkel has managed to paper over the deep differences that are marring her fourth term in office.

Yet Maassen’s transfer to the post of minister of state at the interior ministry is unlikely to restore faith in the German government’s problem-solving abilities. Once again the affair has touched on the most divisive issue of all: what to make of Merkel’s refugee policy that brought over a million Syrians and other asylum seekers to Germany in 2015/2016.

“Targeted Disinformation”

Maassen, who has long been critical of Merkel’s refugee policy, was under fire for an interview about right-wing riots in Chemnitz. He had “good reason,“ he said, to believe that a video showing neo-Nazi hooligans attacking dark-skinned people in the streets of Chemnitz at the end of August wasn’t real. Maassen actually spoke of “targeted disinformation.”

But not only had the top civil servant not informed the chancellery of his suspicions; Maassen was unable to provide any proof for his statements. Add to that reports of surprisingly friendly meetings with representatives of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD), and Maassen appeared to have overstepped his bounds.

A major coalition crisis ensued, with Interior Minister Horst Seehofer backing Maassen and the Social Democrats, Merkel’s junior coalition partners, demanding his removal. Two emergency meetings of party heads were devoted to the issue before an agreement was reached on September 18.

According to the deal, Maassen has to leave his job at the helm of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV). But he wasn’t kicked out or forcibly retired. Instead, he was promoted to minister of state in the interior ministry, a higher-ranked and better-paid job (by a hefty €2,500 per month). This may not be the outcome Maassen would have wished for, but it was certainly a lot better than he could have expected.

Interior Minister Seehofer, head of Merkel’s Bavarian sister party CSU and internal critic-in-chief of her refugee policy, also has reason to be satisfied. In the end, he wasn’t forced to choose between kicking out his protégé Maassen or leaving the government himself. Instead, he gained a state secretary who shares many of his own convictions and now owes him enormous personal loyalty, too.

An Anti-Merkel Bastion

In the short term, Merkel has kept her coalition together. But she has not been able to solve the deep split within her government. On the contrary, appointing Maassen as minister of state to Seehofer is likely to turn the interior ministry into even more of an anti-Merkel bastion.

The outcome is even more ambiguous for the Social Democrats. The SPD’s leadership got what it wanted: Maassen no longer heads the domestic intelligence service. But a number of leading Social Democrats openly pointed out that the deal actually amounted to rewarding disloyalty. “People wonder: have they all gone nuts?,” commented former party leader and foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel.

Exactly one year after the latest Bundestag elections, polls show that not even a third of voters are satisfied with the work of Merkel’s coalition, and the Maassen compromise is certain not to make them any happier. “You can’t find a better example of politics that normal people don’t understand,” the mass circulation Bild tabloid said in its commentary.

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There is little to be seen of Angela Merkel these days. Of course, she receives visitors, and she is also traveling quite a bit. But in terms of shaping the news and setting the agenda, the German chancellor has retreated from the limelight, and her foes and critics—including officials from her own party and administration—are growing bolder.

No place represents Merkel’s loss of authority more acutely than Chemnitz, a city of 240,000 in Saxony. There, three young men from Syria and Iraq—admitted to Germany because of Merkel’s 2015 refugee policy—are suspected of stabbing a German-Cuban man to death at the end of August. After the killing, thousands of people marched through the city in protest, among them several far-right groups. Neo-Nazis chased and beat up dark-skinned foreigners, while others attacked journalists or showed the forbidden Hitler salute.

A horrified Merkel condemned the “hunt” (Hetzjagd in German) on foreigners. But Saxony’s state premier Michael Kretschmer, a politician of Merkel’s own Christian Democratic Party (CDU), publicly contradicted her. There had been “no mob, no Hetzjagd, and no pogrom,” Kretschmer said after a visit to Chemnitz. He did promise that demonstrators who had become “abusive” would be punished.

Kretschmer, at least, is an elected official, and as prime minister of Saxony, he is not under Merkel’s jurisdiction. But just after his intervention, one of the federal government’s top civil servants joined the chorus. Hans-Georg Maassen, head of the Germany’s domestic spy agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), gave an astonishing interview to the mass-circulation Bild tabloid.

No Proof?

In the interview, Maassen said that his service had no reliable information that any hunt had taken place in Chemnitz. Nor did they have proof that a video showing right-wing extremists pursuing and hitting foreigners was authentic. “According to my cautious assessment, there are good reasons to believe that this may be targeted misinformation, possibly to distract the public from the murder committed in Chemnitz,” Maassen said.

Maassen had not informed the chancellery before the interview—neither of his doubts about the events in Chemnitz, nor of his intention to make them public. His immediate superior, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, another outspoken critic of Merkel’s refugee policy, at first backed Maassen, but later did ask him to provide proof.

It’s the second time within weeks that Maassen’s impartiality and ability to serve as BfV chief has been called into question: a former member of the right-wing, populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) claimed that Maassen had advised the party on how to avoid being put under surveillance by his domestic intelligence agency. Maassen has denied doing so, but opposition lawmakers and some journalists have accused him of harboring a too-cozy relationship with Germany’s far-right. The daily Handelsblatt reported this week about alleged leaks to the AfD from within Maassen’s service.

On September 10, the head of the domestic intelligence service finally submitted a brief report to the interior ministry and the chancellery. It was major climb-down, according to news reports: Maassen was apparently forced to explain that he had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the video, but that it shouldn’t have been so readily believed without verifying its origin.

What sounds like a rather involved story about semantics and bureaucracy has two possible interpretations. The first is reasonably innocent: Maassen, who has long been worried about the security risks that Germany imported by allowing hundreds of thousands of young men into the country, simply made use of the Chemnitz incident to express his service’s unease. In this case, Maassen may still have to step down, but the affair would stop there.

In the second version, Maassen would have acted with at least some encouragement from his boss, Horst Seehofer. In this case, it wouldn’t just be about a rebellious and overreaching civil servant, but about a power struggle at the heart of Merkel’s government. Seehofer was the politician behind the last rebellion against the chancellor, too. Just before the summer break, he threatened to use his authority as interior minister to close off the border for refugees registered elsewhere in the EU, forcing Merkel to go, cap in hand, to beg for concessions from her EU colleagues.

The Bavarian Angle

In addition to leading the interior ministry, Horst Seehofer is also head of the CSU, the conservative Bavarian sister party to Merkel’s Christian Democrats. It is facing regional elections in Bavaria on October 14, and the CSU, which has governed the state for more than 60 years, is doing badly in the polls. If that trend is confirmed in the elections, Seehofer’s party will need a coalition partner to continue governing, which, in Bavarian terms, would be a huge humiliation.

More importantly from Merkel’s perspective, Seehofer will almost certainly have to step down as head of his party if the elections go wrong for the CSU. Down the road, this may rid her of an increasingly unpleasant cabinet member. But in the short term, it means that Seehofer has little left to lose. And he has made no secret of the fact that he dislikes Merkel personally and considers her refugee policy a dreadful mistake. “I cannot work with that woman anymore,” Seehofer said in June.

It is unlikely that Seehofer will actively bring the chancellor down. Time is running short until the Bavarian elections, and Seehofer knows that voters would not thank the CSU for such a step. But he is forcing Merkel to tread extremely carefully, paralyzing the government and making it blatantly obvious how little power the chancellor has left.

Will she be able to recover her grip after October 14? That is certainly possible, though Merkel would need to become much more active and decisive than she has been since her re-election in 2017. But otherwise, bit by bit, her authority will continue to erode. In that case, few people would bet on her completing her current four-year term.

It’s an eventuality that the Social Democrats, her junior partner in government, seem to have factored into their policies already. Over the past several weeks, they have presented far-reaching proposals for new laws—a much more generous pensions system, for instance, or strict rent control for most cities—that are far more suitable to an opposition party or an election campaign than for being part of a stable coalition government.

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It has become a familiar dynamic: AWD News, a website knowing for disseminating fabricated “news,” quoted Marine Le Pen of France’s right-wing Front National allegedly comparing President François Hollande to Adolf Hitler. Le Pen’s comparison quickly went viral and drew considerable condemnation. A fact-checker at the French daily Le Monde, however, debunked the quote – after all, in democracies, the principle of distinguishing between fact and fake applies to everyone, including political opponents. Le Pen, it turned out, had never made the comparison.

It is a small yet significant example of how public opinion in both the US and Europe is being roiled online. And it is not just extremist fringe groups that are to blame. Politicians and mainstream media have long neglected to address the rise of fake news and conspiracy theories that flourished after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump as the 45th US president have thrust this issue squarely into the spotlight. German parties are only now realizing just how powerful modern digital tools can be in influencing public opinion and destabilizing democracy. After the US elections, it was Chancellor Angela Merkel herself who drew attention to the problem of so-called social media bots – automated software active on platforms like Facebook and Twitter that resembles real users. Merkel was so concerned that she suggested a code of conduct for German parties in this year’s election.

For German lawmakers, the way the US election campaigns were conducted came as a sobering realization. Both Trump’s campaign and, to a lesser extent, Clinton’s employed social bots to artificially pad likes on Facebook, create the illusion of widespread support, or frighten and silence moderate politicians with relentless abuse and harassment online. “Bots contribute to a radicalized tone in debates, overwhelming more measured voices,” warned Peter Tauber, chairman of Merkel’s conservative CDU party.

Now barely a week passes without new information emerging, especially from the US, on how hacks, leaks, and fake news can affect an open, democratic political system. Until recently, German politicians only knew trolls: users who sow discord online, inciting hate and abuse and harassing others, either for money or out of conviction. Now, Germany is waking up to the various other ways that opinion can be manipulated, for example by fabricated news stories targeting certain social networks or accounts. Echo chambers prevent people from being confronted with opinions different to their own. And digital tools morph so quickly that even experts are finding it difficult to identify and assess the impact. When Merkel in 2013 called the Internet “unchartered territory,” she was ridiculed. Nobody is laughing now.

The Populist Advantage

The right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, has created its own team of bloggers and wants to found its own television network as well, just as Austria’s far-right Freedom Party did. The AfD justifies the need for these tools with the argument that mainstream media is controlled by the establishment, including the governing parties.

Merkel has warned that biased media only reinforce echo chambers and give fringe groups and their supporters the illusion that they are many, while in reality they are a minority. The anti-Islam Pegida movement’s slogan, “We are the people,” is a classic example.

Experts have highlighted various tools that are increasingly able to influence ever smaller, customized voter groups. In the US, authorities essentially have free rein to gather metadata on individual voters and their opinions. The Trump campaign took profiling to the next level, creating starkly different, even contradictory, political ads to target voters in Pennsylvania versus Florida. These ads specifically addressed the emotions and desires of the individual recipients and voter groups.

Trump’s data team, Cambridge Analytica (CA), was behind that approach. The company describes its work as using “big data and advanced psychographics to grow audiences, identify key influencers, and move people to action.” Essentially, it targets individual voters based on psychological profiles. An in-depth report on CA by the Swiss news site Das Magazin quickly went viral in the German public and among decision makers.

CA had worked with the pro-Brexit campaign as well, gathering massive stores of data on voters and analyzing them to create psychological dossiers. They mined users’ clicks and likes, their purchase histories, their medical information, their smartphone usage and even information on where they live. All that data helped CA understand voters’ beliefs and desires down to the individual. Now there are fears that parties in Europe will buy up metadata on their own citizens and resort to the same measures. France’s populist Front National has reportedly already contacted the company.

At the same time, the combination of globalization and digitalization has provided external actors with new tools to interfere in national elections. In the US, 17 security agencies concluded that Russia hacked the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. According to The Washington Post, after months of vehemently denying any involvement, the Kremlin actually deferred to the president-elect on the CIA’s assessment.

Europe is now worried that Russian hackers could sway elections in the Netherlands, France, and Germany this year, in favor of populist, anti-immigrant (and anti-European) forces. The head of Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the domestic intelligence service – Hans-Georg Maaßen openly warned that aggressive cyberspying and cyberattacks are threatening to destabilize Germany’s democracy. Referring to a high-profile case last year of a German-Russian girl who Russian media said was kidnapped and raped by migrants in Berlin – a claim later refuted by German authorities – he said, “This could happen again next year and we are alarmed. We have the impression that this is part of a hybrid threat that seeks to influence public opinion and decision-making processes.”

Fighting Back

Germany’s security forces are now arming themselves to fight cyberattacks. The government is trying to sharpen legislation on hate speech online and is putting Facebook under increasing pressure to take down blatantly racist, inflammatory, and inappropriate posts the same way traditional media is obliged to do. Social Democrat legislator Lars Klingbeil has proposed a mutual “no-attack” agreement for parties involved in the election campaign, and another parliamentarian, Thomas Jarzombek (CDU), is calling for a press law to hold social media in check – especially as sites like Facebook and Twitter have become primary news sources for many users.

All of Germany’s established parties have agreed not to utilize social media bots in the upcoming campaign. The question remains whether the AfD will go along with the pact. The party originally said it would make bots part of its strategy, but later distanced itself from that statement. These self-regulatory initiatives may help, but the problem is far from solved – third party actors can swoop in and create social media bots in lawmakers’ names without their knowledge, discrediting them. Still, there are key differences with the US and the UK, where societies are far more polarized and data privacy does not carry the same weight it does in Germany.

As Berlin is building up its technical infrastructure in preparation, experts and lawmakers believe education and clarification will be the most effective tools in combating all forms of interference – and they have to be utilized as early as possible. Children, too, have to learn that Facebook and Twitter do not provide objective perspectives on reality, and that algorithms generate bubbles that only reaffirm their own beliefs.

Transparency is considered the best weapon to prevent fake news and conspiracy theories from taking root. Here, too, careful, accurate journalism is paramount, as the example of Le Monde’s fact checking revealed. “The best approach is to talk about it,” said Maaßen. “When people notice that the information they’re receiving isn’t trustworthy, that they are being fed propaganda and misinformation, then the poison of lies loses its effect.”

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