At first glance they seem real, and yet: Lower Saxony's Greens have fallen victim to a fake campaign. Fake election posters hang in four cities, and a website has also been set up. So far it is unclear who is behind it - the state security is investigating.
The Greens have become the target of a fake campaign in Lower Saxony. According to a party spokeswoman, fake party posters were put up in Hanover, Osnabrück, Göttingen and Lüneburg. In addition, the homepage of the Greens state association was copied and supplemented with a false press release with alleged plans for transport policy. The Greens already filed a criminal complaint about the action on Tuesday. As confirmed by the Hanover police, state security is investigating the matter. The public prosecutor's office is also examining the case.
Among other things, Lower Saxony's deputy prime minister and Volkswagen supervisory board member Julia Willie Hamburg can be seen on the posters with the slogan "VW stands for traffic change". Another poster that hung in Hanover shows Federal Economics Minister Robert Habeck tipping off Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing.
"These are not our contents," emphasized Greens spokeswoman Heike Köhn. "It is still completely unclear who is behind it," said Köhn. Even the outdoor advertiser Ströer, on whose billboards the motifs could be seen, does not know the author. "It is not a regularly booked order," said a Ströer spokesman. "In such cases, we immediately take care of the removal of such posters."
The counterfeiters put a lot of effort into their campaign: In fact, the posters with the design that was also used in the state election campaign a few months ago look deceptively real. The fake website is almost a mirror image of the real Green Page, even the imprint was copied. However, the address is green-nds.de instead of gruene-niedersachsen.de.
In terms of content, the fake campaign presents alleged transport policy goals for Lower Saxony, such as stopping the expansion of motorways or switching the car industry to buses, trains and cargo bikes. This is formally based in part on a paper calling for more climate protection in transport from the Greens parliamentary group in the Bundestag. The fake is now acknowledged on the website. There it said that the described traffic goals were "hopefully green demands" - "if that should not be the case, a correction would be helpful in order to be able to better classify the politics of the Greens".
