After buying himself a US president, Elon Musk has been meddling in European politics. British voters are not amused.
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While the partisan divide in Britain may be less pronounced than in the US, there are certainly plenty of fissures, and super-billionaire, presidential puppet master, and right-wing agitator Elon Musk has been spending a lot of time trying to exploit them to get Britons to turn on their left-of-center government and back the far-right Reform UK.
Instead, he has given them a cause to rally around: Elon Musk sucks!
A whopping 71 percent of them have an unfavorable opinion of the mogul after he waded into British politics by dredging up a decade-old scandal involving so-called grooming gangs.
Musk has tweeted on this subject countless times in recent weeks, which makes sense because this is right in his wheelhouse: He gets to undermine a Western democracy with misinformation and inflammatory, anti-immigrant rhetoric.
However, Britons of all political persuasions are a lot less enthusiastic about Musk meddling in their country’s affairs than the billionaire himself is.
Even voters of Reform UK are souring on him.
Supporters of the party, which Musk supports but whose leader, Nigel Farage, is no longer extreme enough for him, are the only group that views him more favorably than not. However, over the past two months, that support dipped considerably.
In November, just over a quarter of Reform UK voters had an unfavorable opinion of Musk. Now, however, that figure is 41 percent.
One of the reasons for this development may be Musk’s enthusiastic backing of Tommy Robinson, a British hatemonger who is currently serving a prison sentence for contempt of court after he continued to spread false claims about a Syrian boy.
Robinson is so extreme that even supporters of the far-right Reform UK party don’t like him. Musk, on the other hand, wants him released from prison.
That’s par for the course because, when it comes to choosing sides in politics, the billionaire consistently backs the most radical option on the right.
Another poll is equally damning.
A mere 16 percent of Britons believe Musk would make a good prime minister, while overwhelming majorities think that the billionaire does not understand the problems of British people, cannot be trusted to do the right thing, does not tend to tell the truth, and only cares about himself.
It’s tough to argue with them.
The results of the two polls are welcome news for those concerned that Musk is trying to do in Europe what he did in the US: Find a far-right, anti-immigrant candidate, get him elected, and have him do his bidding.
While that was a winning formula in the United States, where he now effectively acts as a co-president, things may be a bit more difficult for Musk across the Atlantic, in part because he won’t be able to spend a quarter billion dollars on any candidate like he did with Trump.
In addition, the parties that he has chosen to support are only popular with a fringe segment of the respective populations.
Therefore, it seems highly unlikely that he will ever be a mainstay in 10 Downing Street, the residence of the British prime minister, in the same way that he has been a ubiquitous presence in Trump’s orbit for the past six months.
And that’s the way Britons like it.
