Elon Musk repeats it again: only the AfD can save Germany. He says it twice, and this is preceded by a recommendation that as a German you should vote for the AfD in the upcoming elections in February. He made the statements in an interview on Thursday evening with AfD leader Alice Weidel, on X Spaces (X’s discussion room), which around 200,000 people listened to live. According to the title of the interview, it is a conversation with the ‘leading candidate’ to govern Germany – although the AfD is number two in the polls, not number one.
With the Weidel interview, Musk takes his involvement in foreign policy one step further. Until now, an interview on X was only reserved for ideological relatives from the US. These expressions of support were not very successful: both the conversation with Ron DeSantis in May 2023 and with Donald Trump in August last year. were plagued due to technical problems. It yielded little in terms of content.
Also read
Musk forces the British Prime Minister to defend himself again about the ‘grooming scandal’
There are no technical defects in this conversation, but neither are there any new insights. Weidel herself can kick off with a talk, in which she emphasizes how much Angela Merkel (CDU) and then the failed traffic light coalition (with Olaf Stolz of the SPD as Chancellor) ruined Germany by opening the borders and closing the nuclear power plant after Russian gas was no longer available due to the war in Ukraine. “Either you are very stupid, or you just hate your own country,” Weidel notes. Musk’s response: “It’s the very stupid-category.”
The two agree exclusively with each other. “It’s new to me that I can have a normal conversation without being interrupted or put down negatively,” says Weidel. Occasionally she even seems to ask Musk for advice, for example when he asks her what her view of Israel is: “I actually wanted to ask you about a possible solution, because I don’t see one. Maybe you have an answer to it?” And about Ukraine: “Your government will quickly end the war in Ukraine. What instruments and measures do you think are possible for this?” Musk does not give a concrete answer, he does not want to “speak for President Trump”.
Doubt
Elon Musk’s love for the AfD started with doubt. In June last year he asked himself on his platform “People keep saying ‘far right’, but the AfD policy I have read about does not sound extremist. Maybe I’m missing something.”
Six months later, there was no longer any doubt. “Only the AfD can save Germany,” Musk wrote on December 20 on X, in response to a video by right-wing influencer and climate denier Naomi Seibt. A week later he praised the AfD in a op-ed in Welt am Sonntag as the “last ray of hope” for Germany, which he says is teetering on the brink of “economic and cultural collapse.” According to Musk, the AfD cannot be far-right, because party leader Alice Weidel has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka. Musk: “Does that sound like Hitler to you?”
How does Weidel see media calling the AfD extreme right and associating it with Nazis, he asks her in the conversation. Simple, she says: the Nazis were National Socialists. So Hitler was a socialist, a communist actually, who nationalized industry and collected high taxes. “The greatest success in history after that was to call Adolf Hitler a right-wing conservative. He was the opposite.”
‘Immersion’
The open support of the world’s richest man for a party that the German security service considers “suspected right-wing extremist” is not going down well in Germany. Especially since Germany will go to the polls on February 23, and the AfD will probably break through into national politics. In the polls, the AfD is now the second party with 20 percent of the votes, after the CDU/CSU with 31 percent. At the same time, none of the current parties in the Bundestag want to cooperate with the AfD. The AfD also won many votes in three recent state elections in the east of the country.
Also read
Why the classical-conservative CDU leader Friedrich Merz now has the tide in Germany
Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democrats and most likely the successor to SPD leader Olaf Scholz as Chancellor, said in response on Musk’s contribution Welt am Sonntag that he “cannot recall a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country in the history of Western democracies.” The interview with Weidel may be “election advertising by third parties” for the German authorities and will then lead to a hefty fine for the AfD.
Musk claims that he is allowed to interfere in German politics because he invests a lot of money in Germany. He refers to the controversial Tesla factory near Berlin, a project that the AfD has strongly opposed. But that is not discussed in the interview. There is resistance to Musk’s interference: “Merz warned the world about the consequences of voting for Trump,” says Weidel. “Talk about foreign interference.” Those who want to limit freedom of expression are the bad guys, Musk adds.
German pollsters do not think that the alliance between Musk and the AfD will bring the party many new voters. However, the interview with Weidel, and all the media attention that accompanies it, contributes to the normalization of AfD. In one op-ed in the British newspaper The Guardian German journalist Hanno Hauenstein argued on Wednesday to look less at Musk and more at the adoption of AfD ideas, for example on migration, by established German politicians.