Elon Musk’s Planned Revolution in Germany May Already Be Underway
By [Author]
(Bloomberg) — Elon Musk’s enthusiastic endorsement of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, along with his free association with Nazi symbolism, is stirring up the campaign for next month’s federal election. The results of Musk’s meddling won’t be known for sure until the ballots are counted on Feb. 23, but the disruptive power of a multibillionaire who has U.S. President Donald Trump’s ear is unsettling Germany’s establishment at a time when the country is already vulnerable economically and politically.
Latest polls suggest the nationalist AfD, as the party is known in Germany, may be gaining ground on the mainstream conservative opposition, as the ruling Social Democratic Party falls further behind. With his help, the AfD’s lead election candidate, Alice Weidel, now boasts more overall engagement on Musk’s X platform than any other German political leader, a recent study found.
Musk’s interventions have been seen as a kind of hybrid actor, closely aligned with a government while not formally acting on its behalf. By wading into German politics, he aims to discredit and weaken Europe’s democratic institutions, according to Felix Kartte, a fellow at the Mercator Foundation in Berlin specializing in digital technology regulation.
Over fewer than 40 days, Musk has called on SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz to resign and proclaimed that only the AfD can “save” Germany. What began with a post on X has led to a newspaper editorial, an online conversation with Weidel, a virtual appearance at a party rally last weekend, and another live video link-up that was planned on Tuesday at a business conference at the Berlin headquarters of publisher Axel Springer SE, whose CEO, Mathias Döpfner, is among Musk’s German intermediaries.
As discomfiting as this has been for the German mainstream parties, Musk’s more recent flirtations with symbols of the Nazi era have turned frustration to outrage. There was the stiff-armed salute at Trump’s inauguration celebrations, followed by a series of Nazi puns making light of the furor on X. Then came the weekend’s exhortations to Germans to put “past guilt” behind them and look ahead with pride in Germanic culture and values, freed of “multiculturalism that dilutes everything.” His remarks, beamed in to an AfD rally, even managed to impinge on this week’s commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
The immediate and overwhelming reaction in Germany has been shock and condemnation. Scholz called his interventions “disgusting.” Some corporate participants at the Springer event were privately keen to stress that they would attend in the morning and be gone by the time Musk beamed in later on Tuesday. Christiane Benner, the head of Germany’s most powerful labor union, IG Metall, said the billionaire’s actions were “unacceptable.”
Yet the flurry of appearances in support of the EU-skeptic, climate-change denying AfD make it impossible to ignore Musk’s interventions. And in uniting a German majority against him, Musk is effectively deepening the polarization in a society whose post-World War II success was built upon political compromise and the necessity for stable coalitions able to govern what is now the world’s No. 3 economy.