German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck has agreed to stop accusing upstart populist party Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) of being bought by the Kremlin after the party took legal action against him in court.
Habeck, a Green, had made the accusations against the BSW and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) during the election campaign in the eastern German state of Saxony in August.
The BSW strongly opposes German military aid to Ukraine and has been accused by some critics of repeating Russian propaganda in its rhetoric on the issue.
According to the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Habeck said during a speech in Dresden in August: “Making yourself pay for your opinion, buying votes on the Internet, building up troll armies, having your opinion bought: that’s disgusting and it’s not decent, and we know that AfD and BSW are paid in the same way.”
The BSW took legal action over the comments. Habeck has now signed the associated cease and desist declaration, a Green Party spokeswoman said on Monday.
According to the spokeswoman, Habeck had “exaggerated a little too much” during the campaign event.
Sahra Wagenknecht, the founder and namesake of the BSW, wrote on X: “Lies have short legs. (…) It is good that the courts have stopped this spread of fake news.”
According to the Greens, Habeck’s statement referred to questions about the BSW’s funding and the fact that the BSW “has not provided the promised transparency about where the money actually comes from.”
The Greens have urged the BSW to provide more transparency into how the new party finances its election campaigns.
During his speech in Dresden, Habeck, the leader of the Greens, said that people are certainly allowed to disagree with the current German government’s position on aid to Ukraine.
He also acknowledged that the government is not doing everything correctly in this area.
“But,” the Süddeutsche Zeitung quoted Habeck, “no one has been completely bribed – unlike the AfD and BSW.”
He added that everyone knows “that many of them are paid from Moscow and Beijing.”
The Russian government under President Vladimir Putin has been trying to influence opinion in Germany for a long time. However, according to the newspaper, there is no concrete evidence of payments by Russian agencies or intermediaries to the BSW.
This also applies to a group set up by the BSW, the association BSW eV, which is not subject to political campaign financing rules but passes donations to the party.
Several AfD politicians suspected of receiving money from Moscow have also denied the allegations.