South African-American billionaire Elon Musk promoted the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) in unambiguous terms in a newspaper column, prompting the publication’s opinions editor to resign in protest.
Germany has been failed by its legacy parties and is teetering on the brink of collapse, Elon Musk wrote in an op-ed for the Sunday edition of the national newspaper of record Die Welt. His diagnoses of Germany’s problems came with a suggested solution, voting for the right-sovereigntist AfD.
The legacy media and prevailing political opinion in mainstream Germany considers the AfD extreme if not outright dangerous. Moves to ban the party are attempted and elements of the force have been investigated by Germany’s political police. Yet Musk in his interjection called on German voters to judge the party on its policies.
He wrote, further: “he AfD, even though it is described as far-right, represents a political realism that resonates with many Germans who feel their concerns are ignored by the establishment… Portraying the AfD as far-right is clearly false, considering that Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!”.
Musk has a major Tesla factory in Germany and his points often veered towards those that intersect with those interests, like the German economy and energy policy. Yet he also spoke of border control, a hot-button topic in Germany and the area where the AfD is most strongly differentiated from other parties. He wrote that immigration policy is “not about xenophobia, but about ensuring that Germany does not lose its identity in the pursuit of globalization. A nation must preserve its core values and cultural heritage in order to remain strong and united.”
The Musk op-ed was published in tandem with a rebuttal by incoming Welt editor in chief Jan Philipp Burgard, who takes up his role on january 1st, and who stated his view that while Musk has impressive powers of perception and is right in his diagnoses of Germany’s problems, he nevertheless errs in his solution, calling support for the AfD “fatally wrong”.
Burgard went on to criticise the AfD for wanting to challenge the status quo and for having views outside of the Berlin mainstream. Mainstream parties who created all the problems Germany presently experiences can definitely be trusted to fix them, the newspaper boss insists, intoning of Musk’s interjection: “Even a genius can be wrong.”
There were other, even stronger responses from the staff at Die Welt to the paper carrying Musk’s piece. Indeed, the publication’s opinions editor Eva Marie Kogel went straight to X/Twitter to announce she was resigning over the matter.
If Musk’s comments have any impact on German politics, it could be an existential matter for the legacy parties which have spent years carefully building a cordon sanitaire around the nascent AfD, working to keep it locked out of power. Similar efforts have been enacted in many other European countries, with varying degrees of success.
The intervention follows similar involvement in British politics in recent weeks, with Musk offering at least tacit support to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which is soaring in the polls. This has been met with howls of derision in Britain, and clearly much the same is being felt in Berlin. The likely next Chancellor of Germany Friedrich Merz of the centre-right CDU called it “intrusive and arrogant”.
Germany is presently heading to a snap general election after its outgoing ‘progressive coalition’ collapsed in November, on the day President Trump’s second term was proclaimed to the world. Per remarks from Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the time, these events were not unconnected.
If present polling is reflected in the February vote, the AfD is set to double its seat-count in the nation’s parliament, the Bundestag, and be the second largest party after the CDU. Yet with two months to run and another terrorist attack against a German Christmas market in the headlines, nothing is yet decided.
