Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has said “things will get much worse” for Germany unless voters rally behind the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in next month’s federal election.
The Donald Trump ally was speaking in a live-streamed conversation on his X (formerly Twitter) platform with AfD co-leader Alice Weidel, the party’s lead candidate in the February 23rd election.
“If people want change I strongly recommend they vote AfD, this is a sensible move, Alice Weidel is very reasonable personally and hopefully people can tell that from this conversation,” he said. “Nothing outrageous is being proposed, just common sense ... people need to get behind the AfD or things are going to get much worse for Germany.”
With up to 205,000 people listening in, the 45-year-old German politician criticised the widespread labelling of her party as far-right extremist, insisting the AfD was a conservative libertarian movement.
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“I want independently-thinking, confident and educated people, a state that is minimised in its function and letting people have freedom of speech,” she said.
Ms Weidel, a trained economist, said ex-chancellor Angela Merkel “ruined our country” with an open-door migration policy and “wrecked and destroyed” Germany’s economic backbone through ill-advised energy policy.
Ms Weidel has long been an outspoken voice on “culturally foreign” immigration to Germany, which she has described in the past as leading to “the systematic destruction” of German civil society.
In their conversation she said mass immigration to Germany in the last decade had seen a surge in “Muslim crime”.
In a wide-ranging conversation the two frequently described as “crazy” Germany’s status quo politics: its pivot toward renewable energy, income tax burden, education system, migration policies and business red tape.
“One should never ascribe to malice what can also be ascribed to incompetence,” he joked, recalling how his factory outside Berlin required a 25,000-page building permit – in multiple copies – that filled a truck.
In a wide-ranging discussion, Mr Musk promised unmanned spaceships to Mars in two years’ time and described US-Hungarian businessman-philanthropist George Soros as “anti-human”.
Asked by Mr Musk on Israel, Ms Weidel insisted she “absolutely” supported the state of Israel but that prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu had made “some mistakes” in the past.
Asked by Ms Weidel on Donald Trump’s plan to end the war in Ukraine, Mr Musk said to expect “strong leadership in the US to get this done” but offered no detail.
He was confident, too, that the Trump administration cold help bring about peace in the Middle East. The Tesla founder’s personal three-point plan would “eliminate” those out to destroy Isreal, the re-education of Palestinian children not to hate Israel from a young age and bring prosperity to Palestinian territories.
Thursday’s event was the latest intervention in the German election that has sparked controversy – and some amusement – in Germany.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz, asked about Mr Musk’s claim that only the AfD could “save” Germany, replied: “I don’t believe in courting Mr Musk’s favour. I’m happy to leave that to others. The rule is: don’t feed the troll.”
The AfD began life over a decade ago as an anti-EU bailout party and now embraces neoliberal economics, xenophobic anti-migration and pro-Russian security policies. Last September it topped the poll in one eastern regional election and finished second in two other polls. In second place in opinion polls with 20-21 per cent, the party hopes the Musk will lift its support to another level.
Despite record support, party politicians court controversy regularly over comments relativising the Holocaust and pushing the “remigration” – forced deportation – of millions of immigrants and non-ethnic German citizens.
In a televised debate last October, pressed on the term “remigration”, Ms Weidel called it a “law enforcement” proposal to forcibly remove anyone without a residence permit or who commits crimes.
The AfD surge in support has forced other parties to shift, in particular the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
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Last week CDU leader Friedrich Merz attracted controversy for suggesting that dual citizens who commit a crime here should lose their German passport.
Mr Musk’s interest in German politics has sparked heated debate, too, around the Springer media group and its Welt conservative newspaper.
In an opinion piece late last month, published in the newspaper’s Sunday edition, Musk said the AfD was the last hope to prevent Germany “becoming a shadow of itself”.
“The traditional parties have failed, their policies have led to economic stagnation, social unrest and a hollowing out of national identity,” he added. “The AfD ... represents a political realism that is well received by many Germans who feel that their concerns are ignored by the establishment.”
Labelling it right-wing extremist was false, Mr Musk added, citing as proof Ms Weidel’s same-sex relationship with a Sri Lankan woman.
“Does that sounds like Hitler? I ask you.”
Amid a barrage of criticism, Welt publisher Jan Philipp Burghard, who wrote a contra piece, defended his decision to publish Mr Musk’s pro-AfD piece.
“We have started a worldwide debate about the consequences of an in-part right-wing extremist party taking power in Germany,” he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ) daily, accusing critics of double-standards for calling the Musk piece an unwarranted election intervention.
He cited other such articles – US-Hungarian billionaire George Soros for the Greens in 2019 or a 2022 Le Monde article by Olaf Scholz backing Emmanuel Macron for a second term as president.
Other leading German politicians, he pointed out, had intervened regularly in US political campaigning to denounce Donald Trump as “dangerous and shameful”, while Die Zeit weekly published an opinion piece by Vladimir Putin 2021, after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea.
Some of Musk’s interventions have sparked more mirth than controversy, such as his attack on Germany’s largely ceremonial federal president Frank Walter Steinmeier as an “undemocratic tyrant”.
Musk’s interventions have been cheered in some corners of the German media. The right-wing nationalist portal Achgut defended Musk’s right to praise AfD and its plans to tackle German red tape, given he spent €5.6 billion on his Tesla factory outside Berlin.
“He probably knows more about Germany’s metastatic bureaucratic monster Germany than the entire government,” it commented, “because he has experienced it first-hand.”
For her part, Alice Weidel has dismissed German criticism of Musk’s interventions as part of a campaign pushed by “questionable” non-governmental organisations.
“It threatens the left’s dominance of discourse,” she wrote on Twitter/X. “Elon Musk gives freedom a path.”
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