According to opinion polls, two days before the general election, the SPD is still ahead.

The Union and the Greens, who seemed to be on top in the spring, have left massive feathers.

One explanation for this is: The SPD has bet on the right candidate for chancellor, the Union and the Greens have the wrong ones.

Olaf Scholz didn't make any mistakes, Annalena Baerbock and Armin Laschet have that in series.

Scholz has his party - which did not want him as chairman - behind him, the Greens clench their teeth, in the Union the CSU begins to deconstruct its own camp before election day.

That dominates the perception of the media and the mood in the country, how much we will know shortly after 6 p.m. on Sunday.

Michael Hanfeld

responsible editor for features online and "media".

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That is an explanation for which, if one looks at the internal processes of the parties, there is much to be said for.

But there is also another, and it has to do with mood makers on the Internet, with false claims and hatred and agitation, with a dirty election campaign à la Donald Trump, run by amateurs and professionals who know how to work with just a few thousand people Telegram, Twitter and TikTok can create a wave that journalists also love because they think that the unfiltered voice of the people is being expressed there, while the process is specifically controlled.

Olaf Scholz was little affected by such campaigns, but Annalena Baerbock and Armin Laschet were much more affected.

Nude photos and Nazi references

The journalists' office “Correctiv” has just carried out extensive research on this. She follows how Annalena Baerbock has been shot since April. It begins with mockery of a slip of the tongue two years ago. This is followed by collages with nude photos or Nazi references, a photo showing Annalena Baerbock with George Soros (they met at the Munich Security Conference 2019). Then the false claims that the Greens want to ban pets and fireworks and abolish the widow's pension, Annalena Baerbock, whose campaign book actually contains tons of plagiarism, has no university degree and is in favor of pedophilia.

The CDU chancellor candidate Armin Laschet is also doing badly on the Internet.

This has above all to do with the Telegram group "Destruction of the CDU".

She arranges Twitter hashtags like #laschetverhütung, #laschetschrittenab or #laschetluegt, under which many quickly gather to talk about the candidate.

How this works is explained to the researchers at “Correctiv”, as they write, someone from the satirical party Die PARTTEI: There are several networks in which ideas for hashtags arise, and then it is “relatively easy on Twitter with the algorithm that one is positioned very quickly high up ”.

THE PARTY knows how to do it

The fact that someone from the party Die PARTTEI co-orchestrates something like this has a special note: at the end of August, the ARD did not see the film "Election campaign undercover - How PR professionals manipulate us", which wanted to convince viewers that the general election could be affected by windy PR - Influenced people from London who launch smear campaigns on the internet. The journalist Peter Kreysler appeared as a supposed prospect for such actions. His legend was that he was the campaign manager for The PARTY. What the PR people are expected to do, the satirical party members can apparently manage all by themselves.

Journalist Lars Wienand researched for the t-online portal at the end of July that the now closed Telegram group “Destruction of the CDU” was not an amateur club.

She not only makes appointments for campaigns on Twitter, but also on the Chinese network TikTok, which is mainly used by younger people.

The contact person for the TikTok channel is the Fridays For Future activist Linus Steinmetz, who portrays the whole thing more or less as a private matter.

The team consisted of about fifty people.