There is a guy in Germany who runs a blog in the Russian language which draws a readership of 100,000 fellow ex-Soviet Germans. He also campaigns for the anti-establishment AfD (Alternative for Germany) party which has been making major inroads in securing support from the Russian speakers as well as other Germans.
That can mean only one thing: it is time to proclaim Russian Germans a giant trojan horse of Vladimir Putin.
That’s certainly true according to Bloomberg:
But if Putin has a Trojan Horse in German politics, it’s an estimated 2.5 million voters who like Schmidt speak Russian and make up the country’s largest minority voting bloc.
Most so-called Russian Germans have ancestors who moved to the Russian Empire to farm and began to return en masse after the Cold War. Up to three-fifths of these people consider Russian TV more trustworthy than domestic broadcasts and 40 percent say it’s their main source of news, a survey by the Bonn-based Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom shows.
So far, polls show Merkel more popular than her Social Democrat challenger Martin Schulz, though her CDU’s margin over his SPD is much narrower. The AfD has pulled support mainly from Merkel, luring an estimated 1.5 million Russian speakers like Schmidt with its strident opposition to the largest flow of migrants into Europe since the Second World War.
Funny stuff. If you’re a Russian German in Germany you better get your news from Bloomberg and vote the way everybody else does or you’re a threat.