Musk's Meddling in European Politics
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This is On the Media's Midweek Podcast. I'm Michael Olinger.

It's been a busy few weeks for Elon Musk. His Department of Government Efficiency, also known as Doge, recently gained access to the Treasury's payment system. That's, as one journalist put it, essentially America's checkbook.

Musk also announced that Trump has agreed to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which distributes billions of dollars in aid around the world. Doge is also said to be behind the letter that the Office of Personnel Management sent to two million employees, inviting them to resign. And somewhere in there, Musk also found time to involve himself in politics abroad.

According to the Financial Times, 225 out of Musk's 616 tweets and retweets in the first week of January were about UK politics. Meanwhile, Musk has praised the prime minister of Italy, far-right politician Giorgia Maloney, describing her as, quote, even more beautiful on the outside than on the inside.

That at a time when his company, SpaceX, is reportedly in talks for a $1 billion contract with the Italian government. And then there's his entrance into the German political scene. Elon Musk has once again voiced his support for the German far-right political party, the Alternative for Germany, or AFD. He argued that the AFD represents the hope Germany needs as it, quote,

teeters on the brink of economic and cultural collapse. Watching all of this are Europe's leaders. Norway's prime minister says Musk's interventions are "worrying." And the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has said, "Ten years ago, who would have imagined that the owner of one of the world's largest social networks would be intervening directly in elections?"

This past weekend, there were major protests against Musk's favored party. Over 150,000 people have gathered in Berlin to call on Germany's other political parties not to cooperate with the far-right AFD. Bojan Pacewski is chief European political correspondent at The Wall Street Journal. I spoke to him about Elon Musk's political profile in Germany and its consequences.

First up, what did the German press make of that gesture? You know, the one he made twice at Trump's inauguration? Well, one thing you have to know, obviously, the German public is much more sensitive to these type of things because of the history of the Second World War and Nazism and the Holocaust. So gestures like that

are actually banned by law in Germany. You can get prosecuted and fined and even jailed for doing stuff like that. When Elon did that gesture, it did trigger a lot of sort of frenzy in the media coverage in Germany. The German weekly newspaper Die Zeit ran an editorial with the headline, quote, and this is a translation, a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute. Yeah.

kind of reveals a little bit that he's not in tune that much with the German public opinion or the sensitivities of Germans. The perception of his persona has suffered in recent months since he started being politically active. Yeah, I want to dig into how he started inserting himself so aggressively into German politics in the first place.

He began sharing his views back in December with an ex-post that declared, quote, only the AFD can save Germany. The alternative for Germany is a party that's been designated as extremist by the German courts. You think that...

Musk may have originally been emboldened by Donald Trump to come out and make this comment. So here's the timeline the way I understand it. At Mar-a-Lago, President Trump reported briefly from his phone call with Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany. He was a boring guy. He's, you know, no personality. And he basically said his usual complaints about Germany, how they're taking advantage of the United States. I think that's a kind of a pet peeve of his that Germany has a huge...

trade deficit with the United States. And then immediately after that meeting, Musk unleashed this series of tweets. And he came out as a supporter of the IFT. And he also criticized a bunch of German politicians, including the chancellor.

As you and others have reported, Musk's views on German politics had been shaped by some prominent accounts on his platform, X. We could trace some of his politics back to June when he began privately messaging with a right-wing influencer named Naomi Seibt. Who is Seibt and how is this mid-20s influencer having such an outsized effect now on geopolitics?

Well, that's a super interesting story. You know, she's been active on social media ever since she was, I think, 18 or 19 years old. And initially she started posting stuff about the vaccine mandates. She opposed them. She was a high school student then. And then she was posting about climate change policies that she had disagreed with. She was quickly picked up by the German media because she's very eloquent. As a high school student, she was participating in even winning science contests.

And so the Spiegel magazine, which is the kind of leading current affairs left-leaning magazine in Germany, called her the anti-Greta. You know, Greta Thunberg is the icon of the kind of climate movement. And then from there, she shifted to posting about German politics. She told me that she had noticed there's a niche where, you know, German politics seem to be interesting to a lot of people, she thought, but not many people actually posted about it on social media in English.

except for kind of mainstream journalists such as myself. And she apparently was right because she got 400,000 followers on Instagram

And she had posted something about supporting the IFD, the AFD. And Musk replied to that tweet and said, why do people say this party is extremist? And they had a little exchange. She explained her views on the IFD and why she supports them. She told him that they are not extremists. In fact, that they are liberal libertarians.

freedom-loving people and stuff like that. She said, quote, I explained that the Nazi stigma is wrong. The AFD has nothing to do with the National Socialists and Adolf Hitler, who was an imperialist oppressor wanting to conquer other nations. She said, quote, I told him AFD is more like America first, like the Trump movement. You know, she's echoing the views of people from within the party. The AFD is indeed a broad church. It's a relatively new party. I think they're 12 years old.

and some of their leaders even have been essentially described as far-right extremists by the Internal Security Service of Germany and other authorities. I mean, there's one leader in particular who's

Name is Björn Höcke, very Germanic name, a bit of a mouthful, in the eastern state of Thuringia. And a court actually ruled that people can call him a fascist on the basis of things he had said before.

Bjorn Höcke was reportedly fined twice for using a banned Nazi slogan, everything for Germany. He also reportedly gave a speech in 2017 to the youth wing of the party saying that, quote, we Germans, our people are the only people in the world who planted a monument of shame in the middle of our national capital, referring to the Holocaust remembrance monuments.

I should also add that Alexander Golland, who was one of the co-founders of the party, gave a speech to the youth wing saying that Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird poop in the more than a thousand years of successful German history, and that Germans should be, quote, proud of the achievements of German soldiers in two world wars. So certainly some prominent members of the party have engaged in trivialization of the Holocaust.

Absolutely. You know, it is a very controversial party. There are people there who definitely distance themselves from that kind of rhetoric. One of them is the co-leader, Alice Vidal. She was actually interviewed by Elon Musk yesterday.

on X, and she describes herself as a liberal libertarian. She's a former kind of finance executive. Last summer, I asked her why she would not remove some of them if she's already the leader, but she basically, even though she's formerly the leader, she doesn't have the power

Yes, but in early January, when Elon Musk hosted a 70-minute live conversation with Vidal on X, she repeated the...

a historical sort of dubious meme that Hitler and the Nazis were actually socialists. He wasn't a conservative. He wasn't a libertarian. He was a communist socialist guy. Hitler was obviously a fascist. He banned the communist and socialist parties from Germany. He outlawed unions.

He wasn't a socialist. So if she's trying to distance herself from this kind of rhetoric, then why is she playing this sort of historical revisionist game?

Well, that's a very good question. A lot of people were wondering about her comments because they didn't seem to be particularly popular with any kind of demographic in Germany or outside of Germany. I mean, her spokesman told me that she wanted to distance herself from Hitler and kind of emphasize the difference, the kind of the enormous gap between Hitler's thinking and her thinking. But I think it was just a major blunder in terms of PR. I want to return to...

The story of Elon Musk's support for the AFD. One of the people who has shaped his thinking on German politics is his friend, a tech investor, Martin Varsavsky. How did he ultimately help shape the conversation we're having?

When Musk started tweeting or posting about his support for the IFD, Martin contacted him and told him, why don't you write an article in a newspaper and explain what you mean by this? And as it were, Martin sits on the supervisory board of a big German media company, Axel Springer.

So Martin offered to speak to an editor at a newspaper called Die Welt. The article was published. It became extremely controversial because it was seen as election interference, publishing in a kind of reputed German newspaper with a sizable circulation and reach in the country.

That was a kind of a step too far for many politicians in particular. Germany's Friedrich Merz, he's the leader of the Christian Democratic Union Party, the man who could potentially become Germany's next chancellor. He's told German media he can't remember a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country in the history of Western democracies. And it was also a step too far for even some of the journalists who worked there.

Well, indeed, the editor in charge of that section where the article was published resigned the day after it was published. And then the debate heated up and kind of peaked when Elon actually showed up at a rally of the IFD party. He basically started personally campaigning at their rallies. Fight for a great future for Germany. Fight for a great future for Germany. Go, go, go. Convince your friends, convince everyone. Let's go.

At that AFD rally, Musk joined in by video. It's okay to be proud to be German. This is a very important principle. I think there's like...

Frankly, too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, or even let alone their parents, their great-grandparents, maybe even. I don't think he's really perceptive of the very nuanced nature of the German debate, and it seems like he doesn't really care, because while perhaps half of the party rejoices at his support and embraces it and thinks that it will help them,

almost half of the party is very silent about him. I mean, the leader that we discussed earlier, Björn Höcke, he hasn't even mentioned Elon Musk, right? Because it doesn't pay off for him to talk about it because his grassroots...

They hate America. They don't like American oligarchs. They don't like the United States of America. They like Russia. It's much more profitable for him to talk about Vladimir Putin in friendly terms than about President Trump, perhaps, and certainly about Elon Musk.

So there's a really interesting discrepancy that he supports a party, a chunk of which certainly doesn't want that support at all, or they think it won't help them in the election. We still don't quite understand how this big endorsement will actually help AFD on election day, February 23rd. AFD is polling in second, which is itself remarkable.

How influential do you think Musk has really been on German politics? So in the immediate aftermath of his interview with the IFDA leader, Alice Weidel, a couple of polls showed that they went up

between 1 and 1.5 percent. So it could well be that he's helping them a little bit. One of the pollsters told me that he's making them kind of legit or palatable to the broad population. But, you know, I've not seen any granular data attributing that bump to him personally, because there are a number of issues that could have caused the bump as well. It's

kind of a little bit of a mystery and enigma why he's doing this. I mean, he says he's doing it for the good of his heart because he cares about Germany and humanity. You know, if you're a shareholder of one of his companies, the ones that are publicly listed, would you care for him to focus his attentions on German politics or would you care for him to focus his attentions on making the company more profitable? I think it's probably the latter. He's so incredibly rich. He's so incredibly influential already.

This notoriety is helping him build his own power, right? Even if we won't know whether his endorsements of AFD will move the needle for German politics. Musk has kind of become something akin to a state actor in Europe. I mean, he's commanding the attention of the most senior leaders in several countries. I mean, in Germany, he's elicited support.

Very strong criticism from the president of Germany, from the chancellor of Germany, from selected senior ministers, from the leader of the opposition, from the likely next chancellor of Germany. In Italy, he's been welcomed by the prime minister Meloni. She seems to like him. He seems to like her. In Britain, he's also elicited kind of negative response from people in office, starting from the

prime minister downwards. You know, he is this business person who owns a bunch of companies, but it seems like leaders in these ancient European powerful nations feel compelled to respond to his postings on the internet. So that's something quite extraordinary. I don't quite think we've had that before. I can't remember at least that we've had a person from the business world, you know, saying something

It's not even in the media saying something on X or whatever. And then that a bunch of presidents and chancellors and prime ministers will raise to respond. I mean, that's, I think, something very, very new and quite interesting for me as an observer of politics. Boyan, thank you very much. And thank you for having me. Boyan Pachevsky is chief European political correspondent at The Wall Street Journal.

Thanks for listening to this week's Midweek Podcast. Tune into The Big Show this weekend to hear more about how Musk is reshaping our political reality in so many ways. I'm Michael Ellinger.

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