In Basel, a party openly sides with Putin’s GLP national councilor: “We are not elitist Nobel Prize winners”

The closer the deadline for the election campaign gets, the harsher the tone in the party statements becomes. In a press release sent yesterday, SP President Cédric Wermuth said that Russian leaders were deliberately inciting hatred against foreigners, wanted to weaken solidarity with Ukrainian refugees “and, with the SVP, strengthen pro-Russian forces in parliament.” What happened?

The background is a video that has been making the rounds online in recent weeks. It shows a black man urinating on the street in front of a cafe in Baden. The blurred fragment was shared so often that it prompted the Federal Intelligence Service (NDB) into action, as the “NZZ am Sonntag reports”. Because: “Most of the accounts that controlled the distribution of the video are likely not authentic.”the newspaper quotes from an NDB report. Instead, these are likely Russian influence accounts that focus specifically on the issue of migration.

This is a well-known plan in Russian disinformation campaigns: Western states must make believe that they are being overrun by refugees. An EU task force against disinformation has identified even more central messages in Russian propaganda: the so-called fight against ‘elites’, the threat to society of values ​​emanating from LGBTIQ rights and feminism, and the loss of national sovereignty.

This is evident from a communication from the German federal government from the summer of 2022. The proximity to the themes of the SVP election campaign is obvious, even if this has not only existed since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. The People’s Party reacted indignantly to the NDB’s judgment.

The Basel communists have woken up

For the first time, the NDB report makes the Kremlin’s possible influence on the Swiss election campaign at least a little more tangible. Meanwhile, in Basel there is a party that not only openly sympathizes with Russia’s positions, but also campaigns with them. The PDA Basel, a splinter group of the Communist Labor Party that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, greets visitors to its website with the “Internationale” – the national anthem of the USSR until 1943.

The position on the war in Ukraine and Switzerland’s sanctions is central to the PDA Basel. The interpretation of the conflict is identical to Putin’s and ranges from the demand for ‘denazification of Ukraine’ to the position that Crimea and Donbass are clearly Russian territory. Remarkable: The PDA Basel sent a three-page distillation of this pro-Russian opinion to all households in the canton. Overall, the party, which has been barely visible for a long time, has a notable presence with numerous posters in the center of Basel and flyers on public transport.

Leftists did not want to cooperate with the PDA Basel

When asked, PDA candidate Matthias Goldschmidt confirmed that the party spent “tens of thousands of francs” on the election campaign. However, there are fewer than 50,000, which means the party does not fall under the new campaign finance transparency rules. The money comes from a foundation: the Pietro Ghielmetti Foundation, which, according to the foundation’s objective, is committed to ‘enforcing social justice, maintaining and securing world peace and promoting international solidarity’. There has been no contact with Russia since 1991, Goldschmidt says.

Goldschmidt also knows that there is no chance of getting a seat for the PDA Basel: All left-wing parties have refused to work with him, not least because of his positions on Ukraine. For him, it is more about putting his party in the spotlight for the next cantonal elections – “and promoting our positions.” One of these is prominently featured on the flyer: a yes to the SVP’s neutrality initiative.