After buying himself an American president, Elon Musk now hopes that his endorsement can install a far-right government in Germany… or that he can at least sow chaos in Europe’s largest economy.
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Nobody in their right mind wants another Nazi-adjacent party to emerge in Germany. However, that’s not true for people in their far-right-minds, for whom Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is the obvious choice in the country’s election on Sunday.
Like Elon Musk, who has thrown his support behind a party that is being investigated as an extremist organization and has been found to pursue “goals that run against the human dignity of certain groups and against democracy.”
To Americans, it might seem odd that a party can officially be surveilled using wiretaps and informants, even if it is deemed to be anti-constitutional, but it is important to keep in mind that Germany continues to be haunted by its Nazi past and is therefore particularly concerned about far-right movements.
Of course, AfD claims it is nothing like the Nazis of yesteryear. It’s just a bunch of people coming together wanting to keep Germany “pure” and preserve its values. No big whoop.
In any case, if you listen to Alice Weidel, the party’s candidate for chancellor, this is all just a big misunderstanding.
During a live event with Musk meant to help AfD, she said that Hitler himself was a communist and the Nazis were far left and not far right. While that is an assertion that must have come as a surprise to every credible historian, it sounded plausible to Musk.
The billionaire even came up with his own explanation for why Weidel could not possibly be a Nazi. After all, he explained in an editorial in the German daily Die Welt, she is in a same-sex relationship with a woman from Sri Lanka.
As we noted at the time, that doesn’t really mean anything because Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was not exactly a model Aryan himself, and it’s not as though politicians often don’t practice what they preach. Musk, for example, champions himself as a truth-speaking defender of free speech while his record suggests that he is a misinformation superspreader and shuts down speech he doesn’t like.
So, who is right (apart from AfD), German courts and every political scientist… or the party’s leader and Elon Musk?
Why don’t you judge for yourself whether AfD sounds like Nazis.
Here, for example, is Björn Hocke, who leads the far-right wing of the far-right party.
“The big problem is that one presents Hitler as absolutely evil,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “But of course, we know that there is no black and no white in history.”
Well, some parts of history are pretty black and white, for example, genocide.
There are countless public remarks of past and present AfD leaders that should give anybody pause. A lot of them are about putting a more positive spin on what happened during the 12 years when the Nazis ruled Germany, started World War II, and engineered the Holocaust.
The Anti-Defamation League has compiled several of them here.
And these are things that AfD leaders and members are saying in public. In private, their rhetoric sounds even more extreme.
Like Marcel Grauf, who served as a staffer for an AfD member in state parliament and said he hoped for a civil war with millions of dead.
“It would be so nice,” he wrote in a group chat with other right-wing extremists. “I want to piss on corpses and dance on graves. SIEG HEIL!”
In that chat, Grauf also said nobody should be convicted for burning down a home for asylum seekers, and wrote that one benefit of Germany admitting so many refugees is “that we now have so many foreigners in our country that another holocaust would be worth it.”
That is the party Musk endorses.
Much has been made of the billionaire’s gesture at an event following Donald Trump’s inauguration that resembled a fascist salute.
But the problem isn’t whether Musk cosplays Nazi at rallies, but rather that he is using his money and influence to get Nazis and other far-right extremists elected.
He likes to claim that his own politics have not changed, but rather that progressives have moved the country so far left that even moderate policies now seem to be extremist views.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 28, 2022
However, his actions betray that sentiment.
There is nothing “moderate” about his politics, which are characterized by xenophobia and tech bro libertarianism. People just did not realize this because, as a savvy businessman, he carefully guarded his political views so everybody could help him make money.
However, since wading into politics, he has shown his true colors — and those seem to be whites only.
Whenever Musk has a chance to pick a political party to back, he chooses the most extreme, far-right version. In Germany, there are perfectly fine right-of-center options for him to support. Instead, he threw his support behind Nazi-adjacent AfD.
It’s the same in the United Kingdom, where Musk is backing Reform UK, which is the party furthest to the right. And even its leader Nigel Farage is not extreme enough for him.
While the billionaire has supported right-wing and libertarian leaders and candidates across the globe, he has especially focused on Europe, where he waded into politics everywhere from Ireland, Italy, and the Netherlands to Romania and Hungary.
Germany’s election will show how effective he can be on the Old Continent.
AfD is expected to become the second strongest party but has no chance of participating in the forming of a coalition government because all of Germany’s parties have vowed to never work with them.
In addition, while Musk could bankroll Trump’s campaign with more than a quarter billion dollars, that is not legally possible in Germany.
That being said, his ownership of the social media platform X has significantly increased AfD’s visibility. The main question ahead of the election is whether it will help or hurt his fellow far-right extremists.
Germans are not nearly as enthusiastic about him as Republicans were. In fact, Musk and his intervention in German politics are highly unpopular.
And Germans do not just pay lip service to their dislike of the billionaire. In January, sales of his Tesla-brand electric vehicles in the country fell by nearly 60 percent.
In the end, it seems unlikely that Musk’s support will greatly benefit AfD, even though the party will almost certainly achieve its best election result ever. In fact, his involvement could even be a net negative because it might have convinced other Germans to head to the polls who don’t want a South African-born American to tell them whom to vote for.
What is disconcerting, however, is that there is no sign of Musk slowing down.
You can expect him to use his money, influence, and X algorithm to sow dissension across Europe in the hopes that people there will vote for parties that support his extreme views.
In other words, his struggle to turn Europe rightwards is very real… and very dangerous.
