Most Americans probably didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the news out of Berlin earlier this week when incumbent German Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a vote of no confidence, paving the way for elections in February. The developments did not, however, escape the attention of Elon Musk.
In fact, as NBC News reported, the world’s wealthiest individual apparently has some specific opinions about what voters in Europe’s largest country should do next.
Elon Musk waded into Germany’s election Friday, expressing his support for a far-right anti-immigrant and anti-Islam party that’s being monitored by the country’s domestic intelligence agency. ‘Only the AfD can save Germany,’ the tech billionaire wrote on X, referring to the Alternative for Germany party.
For those unfamiliar with the AfD, The New York Times published a fascinating item in 2019 that showed the degree to which the Republican Party is an international outlier among major political parties, well to the right of Britain’s Conservative Party and Germany’s Christian Democratic Union. The Alternative for Germany party, however, is well to the right of our GOP and Europe’s mainstream conservative parties.
Its platform, the Times’ report added, “contains plainly xenophobic, anti-Muslim statements.” It reached the point earlier this year when Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party in France decided to stop working alongside the AfD because it was too extreme.
The NBC News report, meanwhile, added:
The party is monitored by the country’s domestic intelligence agency for suspected extremism. Party leader Björne Höcke has twice been found guilty by a German court of purposefully employing Nazi rhetoric. He has appealed the rulings. And in May the party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, was forced to withdraw from campaigning after he told an Italian newspaper that the SS, the Nazis’ main paramilitary force, were ‘not all criminals.’
It’s against this backdrop that Musk publicly declared that he sees the AfD as Germany’s “only” saviors. The fact that the conspiratorial billionaire has expressed support for such a radical foreign party would, of course, be far less interesting in the United States were it not for the fact that Musk has become a highly relevant figure in American politics, effectively purchasing electoral influence, attaching himself to an incoming president, sitting in on meetings with foreign leaders, huddling with members of Congress, helping kill legislation for reasons that don’t make sense, weighing in on Cabinet choices and heading up a powerless advisory panel that the political world is pretending has real authority. This is the guy who’s also, evidently, hoping to see Europe’s largest country in far-right hands.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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