After helping install Donald Trump as US president, Elon Musk took another hard-right turn as he set his sights on undermining another Western democracy.
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Elon Musk isn’t just dipping his toe into German politics; he is diving headfirst into the far-right end of it. The billionaire, who just completed the purchase of the US presidency last month, now has his sights set on another Western democracy.
In doing so, however, he is showing his true political colors even more than he did when he went full MAGA this year.
Many Americans probably don’t know much about the “Alternative for Germany,” so here is a brief explainer.
The AfD is not merely another European far-right party with anti-immigration views and some populist economic policies. In part, that is because of Germany’s Nazi past. It is far less acceptable there than elsewhere, including in the US, to display Nazi symbols (which is illegal), or to even appear to echo Nazi ideology.
And yet, with a stronghold in Eastern Germany, which was not subject to the strict anti-Nazi education of the West until unification, the ties between the AfD party, neo-Nazis, and Nazi slogans are well-documented.
In fact, the courts have granted Germany’s internal intelligence service the right to continue monitoring the AfD as a potentially extremist organization that could aim to undermine the country’s constitution.
In an opinion earlier this year, the judges said they were “convinced that there are sufficient factual indications that the AfD is pursuing efforts that are directed against the human dignity of certain groups of people and against the principle of democracy.”
That is one of the reasons why none of Germany’s pro-constitution parties will work with the AfD on anything.
But it is not just shunned domestically.
Even other far-right populist leaders refuse to work with the AfD, such as French firebrand Marine LePen, who heads the National Rally.
Earlier this year, she said her party would not work with the German representatives of the AfD because “a movement that has fallen under the sway of its most radical fringe no longer seems to me to be a reliable and suitable ally.”
That is who Musk is aligning himself with.
And his is not a tepid endorsement. Instead, according to the billionaire, the AfD offers the “last glimmer of hope for Germany.”
That’s what he wrote in an op-ed published in the German newspaper Die Welt (The Globe) on Sunday (as an aside, when promoting his column on his social media platform X, which Musk once claimed had to be politically neutral, the billionaire showed off his ignorance of Germany by calling the paper “Weld”).
My opinion piece in Weld https://t.co/J56Oof6tO4
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 28, 2024
In his opinion piece, whose publication was highly controversial, Musk starts off by talking about the economy and touting the AfD’s anti-regulatory platform (something the billionaire is also pursuing in the US since getting rid of any kind of rules makes it easier for him to increase his immense wealth without having to worry about pesky environmental or labor regulations).
However, he quickly gets to the kind of issues that make him so popular with white nationalists.
For example, Musk states that a nation “must preserve its values and cultural heritage to remain strong and united.” Well, according to German courts, the AfD is doing the opposite of that.
It may represent the values of a Germany from bygone times, but certainly not those that the country has been trying to adhere to since becoming a democracy.
Musk, who has zero credentials indicating that he could knowledgeably weigh in on German politics, does address how everybody else perceives the party.
“Portraying the AfD as right-wing extremist is clearly wrong if you consider that Alice Weidel, the party’s chair, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler? Please!”
Well, for somebody who is absolutely clueless, that may seem like a convincing argument along the lines of “Donald Trump sells bibles for $60 a pop! Does that sound like someone who isn’t religious?”
However, anybody familiar with Germany’s history will know that this kind of argument is meaningless. For example, 100 years ago, one could have said, “Adolf Hitler, the head of the Nazis, is an Austrian-born, brown-haired gnome; does that sound like somebody who wants to head a nation of tall and blond German Aryans and burn the world to the ground in the pursuit of subjugating ‘inferior’ races?”
If you put it like that, it doesn’t sound like that at all… and yet it happened.
It’s such a bafflingly dumb argument that it seems crazy that people still think Musk is a “genius.”
His advocacy on behalf of the closest thing Germany has had to a Nazi party in decades does not sit well with the rest of Germany’s parties, including the most conservative ones.
For example, Reinhard Brandl, a member of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, which is the most conservative party (that unquestioningly supports the country’s constitution) in Germany’s parliament, suggested that the billionaire himself endangers democracy.
“Such a concentration of power and reach united in a single person is a serious threat to our democracy,” he told Die Weld Welt.
It remains to be seen whether Musk’s influence in Germany will be able to sway an election the way it did in the US.
What is clear already, however, is that, after helping install Trump as US president, he will certainly keep trying, and that should worry supporters of democracy throughout the globe.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
