The tech entrepreneur and close adviser to Donald Trump Elon Musk has taken a stunning new public step in his support for the far-right German political party Alternative for Germany (AfD), publishing a supportive guest opinion piece for the country’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper that has prompted the commentary editor to resign in protest.
The commentary piece in German was launched online on Saturday ahead of being published on Sunday in the flagship paper of the Axel Springer media group, which also owns the US politics news site Politico.
Musk uses populist and personal language to try to deny AfD’s extremist bent and the piece expands on his post on the social media platform X that he owns, on which he last week claimed that “only the AfD can save Germany”.
Translated, Musk’s piece said: “The portrayal of the AfD as rightwing extremist 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? Please!”
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has classified the AfD at the national level as a suspected extremism case since 2021.
Shortly after the piece was published online, the editor of the opinion section, Eva Marie Kogel, used the US tech mogul’s own platform to post on X that she had submitted her resignation.
Welt am Sonntag is a very conservative paper so the opinion editor resigning is telling. She included a link to Musk’s op-ed in her post so there’s no question about the reason.
If you’re just catching up, here’s a little primer from Vox on the AfD. It’s all very familiar:
A relatively young political party, the AfD was born in 2013 after the financial crisis as a group that protested Germany’s efforts to economically bail out southern countries in the European Union.
Yet while its platform initially focused more on the economy, it seized on the issue of immigration following the 2015 refugee crisis, when Germany took in more than one million refugees from places including Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. This was a roughly 1.2 percent increase to Germany’s population of 81 million people at the time — but it marked a stark jump in the number of refugees than the country had welcomed before.
In recent years, the party has both driven and capitalized on rising backlash toward refugees and immigration.
[…]
As part of its answer to addressing the rise in immigration, the AfD has increasingly embraced a xenophobic and anti-Muslim platform — due to the Middle Eastern origins of many earlier refugees — with the purported goal of preserving German identity and nationalism. “Islam does not belong to Germany,” reads the party’s 2016 manifesto. “Burkas? We’re more into bikinis,” read one AfD tagline from 2017. “Unser Land zuerst,” which translates to “Our country first!” adorned AFD campaign banners in 2022.
“The party has radicalized a lot since 2013,” Jakob Guhl, a researcher focused on the far right at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in Germany, told Vox. As it did, the party grew its base in the more socially conservative regions in eastern Germany, which has typically lagged other parts of the country economically as well.
[…]
In addition to its focus on immigration, AfD has homed in on two other policy areas: climate change and Ukraine aid.
As Germany’s only political party that’s embraced climate change denial, AfD has capitalized on the discontent a fraction of voters feel toward existing environmental policies. Specifically, a law that requires many German residents to swap out their existing fossil fuel-based boilers for heat pumps that run on clean energy has raised many people’s ire due to how costly it could be for homeowners.
A May 2023 Allensbach poll found that as many as 80 percent of Germans were concerned about the decision to phase fossil fuel-based boilers out by this year — a timeline that’s now been extended.
AfD has said that it would back the ongoing use of fossil fuels for not just home boilers, but also the German economy writ large. “AFD said the government has no business in how people heat their homes. Their main message … on climate change [is] that we can just keep on living life as they have before. We have the right to pollute and the right to continue doing so,” says Endre Borbáth, a professor at the Institute of Political Science at Heidelberg University.
AfD has also embraced a pro-Russia position, and urged Germany to abstain from sending Ukraine more aid, a stance that both taps into the country’s commitment to pacifism after World War II, and the sympathies that some in eastern Germany still have with the Kremlin after the USSR’s control of the area following the conflict.
[…]
A common thread across these policy positions and the party’s general branding is that AfD claims it’s defending some Germans’ existing way of life, and that it’s there to push back against any and all attempts to infringe on their rights, even the most mundane.
Last fall, for example, an AfD leader vehemently said she was defending people’s right to eat wienerschnitzel, a fried veal dish, as a greater proportion of the German population has embraced plant-based diets both for health and climate reasons.
“I won’t let anyone take my schnitzel away from me! No one touches my schnitzel,” said Alice Weidel, an AfD leader.
It’s Germany. What could go wrong?
I have thought that this last election was a vestige of the pandemic trauma that was never fully processed. Clearly, that’s wrong. This goes back a lot farther than that. In fact, I have to wonder if the resurgence of the international far right is really just the dam bursting after the cold war held them back during the post WWII world. In historic terms this period is just a blip in time. I shudder to think what’s going to happen as climate change —which they fatuously deny is even happening — turbo charges refugee migration. Yikes.
As for Musk, he’s ignorant about most things outside his own expertise but because he’s so rich he’s a megalomaniac who thinks that he is entitled to a greater say in politics around the world than anyone else. It’s pretty clear that he doesn’t really understand economics or how all of this is interconnected in ways that could easily affect his own interests and those of the country. But his influence is huge at the moment and he’ll be a part of this conversation for some time to come. Unfortunately.