Like any good entrepreneur who found success in one market early on, Elon Musk is now starting to expand into others. Yesterday, Musk – the entrepreneur turned megadonor to Donald Trump – hosted a live broadcast on X with Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s far-right political party, Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD.
“Only the AfD can save Germany, period,” Musk said during the 70-minute conversation, supporting the party ahead of next month’s elections. This is not the first time that Elon Musk has publicly supported the AfD. Late last month, he wrote an article in a German newspaper supporting the aggressively nativist party, whose members and staff have well-documented ties to neo-Nazis and other extremist groups. (The party, for its part, has expelled some politicians and staff over alleged links to such groups, although others always stay).
Musk has spent the last few days hyper-focused on replication the influence campaign he led on American politics. As well as supporting the AfD, he has injected himself into British politics, accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, leader of the UK Labor Party, enabled child sex abuse by failing to tackle grooming gangs like the former head of England’s Crown Prosecution Service and of Wales, and calling for his ouster. (Starmer defended his record, pointing out that he reopened the cases and was the first to pursue the perpetrators.) Musk released a poll on Monday asking X users whether “America should free the British people from their government tyrannical.” Musk also began posting messages in support of Tommy Robinson, an Islamophobic far-right political activist in the United Kingdom who is currently in prison for repeatedly violating court orders related to a defamation case he filed. lost; Robinson falsely declared in Facebook videos according to which a Syrian refugee had “violently attacked young English girls at his school”.
After Nigel Farage, who leads the UK’s far-right Reform Party, said he disagreed with Musk over Robinson, Musk job: “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes. While leading this pressure campaign, Musk has continued to post messages in support of the far right in Europe and its current causes celebre. On Wednesday, he suggested that he were “Sharia Courts” in the United Kingdom, that “British politicians are selling your daughters for votes,” and that “Irish citizens receive longer sentences than illegal immigrants. It’s messed up.
Despite Musk’s ability to become a major political figure in the United States, it is unclear whether his pressure campaign in Europe will bear fruit. Musk’s efforts to influence European politics are hampered by campaign rules that limit the role of money in politics. In addition to his online campaign during the U.S. presidential election, he donated more than $250 million to help Trump, partly funding ads that ran in key states. But in Germany, radio and television advertisements cannot be broadcast In a month after the election. In the UK, national campaign spending in the 365 days before an election is capped at around $40 million per party. The point of view of a greedy billionaire may not have the same meaning in Europe as in the United States: A YouGov survey in November showed that only 18% of Britons view Musk favorably, down from 23% in 2022, after he launched his purchase of Twitter. In the United StatesIn contrast, more than a third of Americans have a favorable opinion of Musk.
Some European leaders, perhaps sensing that their voters share a low opinion of Musk, have pushed back. Starmer accused him of spreading “lies and misinformation”. Even officials from European countries that have not been targeted are speaking out. French President Emmanuel Macron, who recently welcomed Musk to the reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, accused him to “support a new international reactionary movement and intervene directly in the elections”.
But even if Musk fails to achieve his goals of propelling the AfD to power in Germany and ousting Starmer as prime minister, he will likely still have made some gains for Europe’s far right. A YouGov poll from earlier this month showed the AfD polling at 21 percent, behind the dominant center-right party. The party is up two points since the start of last month, suggesting that Musk’s campaign is at least not stifling the party. Although the AfD is an official party with considerable support, it remains considered taboo in much of Germany. All other parties accepted not to work with the AfD, which would have the effect of ostracizing it. Musk’s support for the AfD “is a problem,” Miro Dittrich, co-CEO of CeMAS, a Berlin-based nonprofit that tracks the far right, told me. “This is considered legitimization.” During the conversation with Weidel, Musk attempted to sanitize and downplay the AfD’s far-right leanings and neo-Nazi ties by accusing the media of misrepresenting the party and giving Weidel the space to do the same: Adolf Hiter “was not a conservative; he was not a libertarian,” she told Musk. “He was a communist, socialist guy, so period, no more comments about that, and we are the exact opposite.” (Hitler, of course, was an anti-communist and anti-Semitic dictator.)
Musk does not need to provide support or post aggressive messages to exert his influence over Europe. Even before he attached himself to the Trump campaign, Musk gained significant influence over governments through Starlink, his satellite Internet service. In 2022, Musk would have made the decision not to provide Starlink service to Ukraine as it launched an attack on Russian forces in Crimea, after speaking with the Russian ambassador to the United States. In September, he used the company to partially circumvent a temporary ban on X in Brazil, by refusing to block the website for Starlink customers in the country.
Unless something truly intractable comes between Musk and a goal, he will pursue it relentlessly, no matter how trivial or ill-advised it may be, often. no matter the price to those around him. This is probably how Musk’s political ambitions will manifest themselves. Unless he gets bored, governments around the world will be forced to at least listen to his whims – especially as European leaders grapple with the crisis. possibility of retaliation of the President of the United States. Perhaps a rift between Trump and Musk is coming. Trump has would have started complaining about Musk hanging out at Mar-a-Lago, where he pays $2,000 per night staying in a villa to regularly dine with Trump. Yet even without the president-elect, he has the wealth and connections to exert his will on world politics. Musk is here as long as he wants.