Getting pelted by eggs or tomatoes is an occupational hazard for most hardened politicians on the election trail.

But German Chancellor Angela Merkel, seeking re-election on Sunday, has been confronted with a new kind of protest during her final campaign rallies: flashmobs.

The mobs, groups of people summoned over the Internet to show up at a specific time and place to do something unusual, have materialised at several election events in the last week to wave flags and banners and heckle the unsuspecting Merkel.

Mostly, they have been chanting “Yeahhhh!” after every sentence she utters and the slogan is meant as an ironic expression of support.

It may not sound like the most damaging critique, but Merkel has cottoned on to the flashmobs and now even addresses them at the rallies as “My young friends from the Internet”.

So is this a new form of political protest or just a bit of fun?

Blogger Rene Walter, who writes for nerdcore, says there is a serious idea behind the light-hearted gatherings.

“We are not just going to swallow the election messages, we are spitting back the rubbish Merkel speaks in the ironic form of a “Yeahhh!”, he says in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily.

Many involved in the flashmobs support the Pirate Party, who are popular among young voters and oppose what they say is censorship of the Internet that has been brought in under Merkel’s government.

One thing is for sure. Flashmobs are injecting some much-needed spontaneity into the final days of a campaign which many voters think has been the most turgid in decades.

But are flashmobs here to stay? Could they become the political protest movement of the Internet age?

– David L. Stern covers the former Soviet Union and the Black Sea region for GlobalPost, where this article originally ran. –

With less than six months until it takes over the chairmanship of one of Europe’s flagship human rights organizations, Kazakhstan has thumbed its nose to Western governments and introduced a draconian Internet law.

The new legislation follows similar crackdowns on online political communication in other former Soviet republics and signals a growing fear among officials in authoritarian states after public uprisings in Iran and Moldova were fueled by internet social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook.

Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev signed a law on July 10 that classifies all online public discussions as forms of publication. As a result, any comment that appears on a blog, forum, chatroom or social networking site, such as Facebook and Live Journal, is subject to the country’s already punitive mass media and libel laws. The law also restricts foreign news outlets, which can be blocked if they are likewise found to disseminate information that violates the Central Asian state’s laws on expression.

Human rights groups immediately sounded alarm bells. “The wording of these bans seems to target political discussion, and it is so broad that it could easily give rise to arbitrary interpretations,” said Holly Cartner, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, in a press release.

The Kazakhstan law seems to have been primarily in reaction to web pages that published information about Rakhat Aliyev, President Nazarbayev’s former son-in-law who now lives in Austria. After a falling out with the first family last year, Aliyev — a former ambassador and security chief — is now waging an information war against his former relatives from afar, publishing allegedly compromising telephone conversations.

Kazakh authorities for their part have convicted the former first son twice in absentia, sentencing him to what amounts to decades in prison, first for what they say was his masterminding the abduction of three bank managers, and then accusing him of planning a coup d’etat.

But the Internet’s power, recently in evidence, to mobilize large groups of people and spread information not sanctioned by the powers that be was also foremost in Kazakh officials’ minds. “The Internet should be subject to regulation,” Kazakhstan’s Agency for Information and Communications Chairman, Kuanyshbek Yesekeev, was quoted as saying in the local press. “If it is allowed to drift, then we will repeat the historical experience of Moldova, where because of the Internet people went out onto the streets to strike.”

Officials in the oil-rich Caspian state of Azerbaijan, which is tightly held in the iron grasp of President Ilham Aliyev (no relation to Rakhat), seem to be taking the same approach. Last week, opposition youth activists Adnan Haji-zadeh and Emin Milli were sitting with friends in a restaurant in the capital Baku, when, according to papers filed by their defense lawyer, they were attacked by two men. When they arrived at the local police station to file a complaint, they were arrested on charges of “hooliganism” and face two to five years in prison.

Their supporters claim instead however that their true crime was to have posted a satirical video poking fun at the government on the Internet, featuring a man in a donkey suit holding a mock press conference. The film was a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the Azerbaijani government’s recent purchase of donkeys from abroad for what was considered an unusually large sum, and on a law that restricts the work of NGOs. In it the man in the capacious donkey suit complains of having his luggage stolen and plays the violin (to justify his high price), in addition to directing barbed criticism at the NGO legislation.

“In Azerbaijan, the possibilities for donkeys are enormous,” the donkey tells stoned-faced reporters, according to the translation provided with the video. “If you are donkey enough, you can succeed in probably everything,” he adds. “I would be so much happier in Azerbaijan. I would try to be more [of] a donkey than before.”

Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are considered strategic countries for the West. Both are swimming in oil and gas, and they pursue foreign policies that at times run counter to Moscow’s interests. Both also are secular Muslim countries that have lent key support in the battle with Islamic extremism. In recognition of Kazakhstan’s importance, and in an effort to keep it from aligning more closely with Russia — and possibly China — European countries awarded the Central Asian state for 2010 the one-year rotating chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a 56-member human rights and democracy organization.

Supporters of the move said the chairmanship would encourage Kazakhstan further on the road to participatory government. Critics laughed at the idea that a country with a president-for-life and one-party parliament could oversee key OSCE functions such as monitoring elections. For many, the fact that Nazarbayev signed the legislation just days after a visit by U.S. Undersecretary of State William Burns sent a pointed message to the West that Kazakhstan would not undertake any major political reforms.

“Up until now, it has been a ‘wait and see’ attitude,” said one expert working with a Western organization in Kazakhstan, who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “The Internet law shows that the Kazakhs are not good partners that can be trusted in the chairmanship position,” he added. “They can really damage the organization.”

More from GlobalPost:

Iran stocks up on censorship tools

Italian bloggers strike

In China, this photo may be porn

(Pictured above: An Internet user tries to log onto social networking site Facebook in Tehran May 25, 2009. The Farsi text reads “Dear Customer, access to this site is not possible. In the event that this site has been mistakenly filtered please email filter@dci.ir with the name of the domain and any other necessary explanation.”  REUTERS/Morteza Nikoubazl)

Who remembers the Google Wars website that was doing the viral rounds a few years back – a mildly amusing, non-scientific snapshot of the search-driven, internet world we live in?

It lives on at www.googlebattle.com where you can enter two search terms, say ‘Lennon vs. McCartney’ or ‘Left vs. Right’, and let the internet pick a winner by the number of search hits each word gets.

As we reported here – the virtual world has become a real battleground in the ongoing Gaza conflict – with all sides deploying significant resources.

For Israel – where hasbara or PR has often been frowned upon as unnecessary pandering to international opinion that never turns in Israel’s favour anyway – the second Lebanon war underlined the need for a coherent media and PR strategy coordinated at the centre of government.

The post-mortem of the month-long war with Hezbollah in 2006 - known as the Winograd Commission - recommended a centralised approach to hasbara to avoid spokesmen from different ministries, the army or the police telling different or conflicting stories to a voracious local and international media.

Notwithstanding the fact that the head of the new National Information Directorate did not make it to a scheduled interview with our reporter on the story above  – as my colleague Dan Williams reported here the strategy certainly seems to be working for domestic consumption.

Sources inside the Israeli government have said they are generally happy with the way the strategy has worked internationally as well despite growing international calls for a ceasefire and increasingly angry protests around the world.

The media strategy has been backed up by zero tolerance within the military and security establishment for anyone going “off message” - field commanders or political insiders who seemed to relish leaking tid-bits to their favoured reporters in 2006 are now keeping mum.

And while the virtual media war has raged – with pro-Palestinian websites like electronicintifada.net or Hamas’ own website http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/en/ ratcheting up the rhetoric alongside their Israeli foes – many in the traditional media (or dare I say MSM) complain that they have been totally defeated by Israel’s media strategy which has prevented them from entering Gaza or a ‘closed military zone’ neighbouring Gaza.

The world’s press has been herded on to a hill-top 2 kilometres from the Gaza Strip - where Israeli political and military spokespeople wander among the satellite trucks and live positions ‘briefing’ journalists with the official view of what’s going on inside Gaza.

As much as the protagonists have been duking it out in the virtual world - online media now has the clout to shape the way war stories are told and delivered.

The most surreal example of this is probably Joe the Plumber - yes, that Joe the Plumber of US election campaign fame - who has been engaged by pro-Israeli US website Pajamas Media to file reports from Israeli towns under Hamas rocket fire.

Joe’s basic premise seems to be that the media is inherently biased against Israel and journalists have no business being in the war zone anyway.

While you might not agree with his point-of-view - Joe is an example of the sort of do-it-yourself journalism with a strong voice that has been empowered by the Internet.

Read these two accounts - one from my colleague Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza and this one from another Gaza journalist - and I think you’ll agree that reporting from inside a warzone is important, journalists should be there and the combatants should facilitate rather than threaten this effort.

And by the way - in case you were wondering - a GoogleBattle between Israel and Palestine gives Israel a decisive victory. IDF vs. Hamas, though, has Hamas edging it.

PHOTO CREDITS

Photgraphers take pictures of Israeli tanks. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

Massive explosion in southern Gaza town of Rafah. REUTERS/Ibrahim abu-Mustafa