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Foreign Information Manipulation in the 2025 German Federal Election

ISD,
Alliance4Europe,
Debunk.org,
GMF Alliance for Securing Democracy,
DEN Institute,
EU DisinfoLab.

Foreign and domestic actors exploited societal divides ahead of Germany’s 2025 federal election. Russian-aligned campaigns used AI, bots and media impersonation to spread disinformation, distort engagement and undermine democratic trust.

About the Project

This country election report was developed through the project FIMI Defenders for Election Integrity. The project consortium brings together the expertise from 10 organisations
to develop a multistakeholder foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) framework to effectively monitor, respond to and counter FIMI threats before and during elections, while simultaneously strengthening FIMI defender communities and democratic institutions. This monitoring and response also involved engaging and coordinating with 16 in-country partners from across German civil society and academia.

Over the course of these monitoring efforts, the consortium produced a series of incident alerts to be circulated to relevant election stakeholders in real-time. These incident alerts detail key information about FIMI incidents and their impact in the country of focus and provide a set of recommendations for response. Where insights derived from these incident alerts are mentioned throughout this report, they are signposted with an alphanumeric code beginning with ‘IA’.

Acknowledgements:

About the FIMI-ISAC

The FIMI-ISAC (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Information Sharing and Analysis Center) is the first ISAC worldwide dedicated to fighting FIMI and creating common standards in this field. It unites a group of like-minded organisations that protect democratic societies, institutions and the critical information infrastructures of democracy from external manipulation and harm. Through collaboration, the FIMI-ISAC enables its members to detect, analyse and counter FIMI more rapidly and effectively while upholding the fundamental value of freedom of expression. The FIMI-ISAC does not act independently to counter FIMI. Instead, enhancing collaboration empowers its members to do so more effectively.

Infrastructure

This report and project were facilitated through the Counter Disinformation Network.
The CDN is a collaboration and crisis response platform, knowledge valorisation resource, and expert network, bringing together 58 organisations and over 300 practitioners from OSINT, journalism, fact-checking and academia from 25 countries. The network has been used to coordinate projects on four elections and has produced 76 alerts since its creation in May 2024.

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