“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.”
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."
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