Elon Musk's support for AfD makes waves in Germany

He played a crucial role in Donald Trump's election victory; he has launched scathing attacks on the UK's Keir Starmer; and now, Elon Musk is meddling in our politics too, said Hannes Niemeyer in Frankfurter Rundschau (Frankfurt). Ahead of Germany's federal elections in February, the billionaire has been using his X/Twitter site to urge people to vote for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

But what has really enraged Germany's political classes is an opinion piece he wrote in the Sunday edition of Die Welt, in which he described the country as on "the brink of economic and cultural collapse". "The description of AfD as far-right is made obviously false simply by noting that Alice Weidel, the party leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka!" he added. "Does that sound like Hitler to you?" A fierce backlash ensued: Die Welt's opinion editor resigned, and Musk was subjected to a barrage of cross-party criticism. But it hasn't put him off: on the contrary, he has stepped up his attacks on Chancellor Olaf Scholz and other establishment figures.

Musk is "the greatest entrepreneurial genius of our time", said Jan Philipp Burgard in Die Welt (Berlin): his innovations, built on a "radical analysis of the status quo", have "revolutionised the payment, automotive and space industries". And his diagnosis of Germany's ills isn't far wrong: we are indeed in an "economic and cultural crisis", owing to the misguided energy, migration and social policies initiated by Angela Merkel and largely continued by Scholz's disastrous "traffic light" coalition. But his claim that only the AfD can save us is "fatally wrong". This is a party that wants to take Germany out of the EU – a crazy idea for an economy so heavily reliant on EU exports. It wants to realign Germany with Russia, at the likely expense of its ties with the US and its international credibility.

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As for its plan to "remigrate" millions of people, that simply doesn't hold water. Still, you don't have to agree with Musk to defend our right to publish a piece by him, said Veronika Grimm in the same paper. His Tesla car firm has a huge factory near Berlin, where the AfD is second in opinion polls. That his piece triggered such a furore is a sad indictment of free speech today.

Musk may have interesting things to say, said Meredith Haaf in Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich), but all he gave us in his opinion piece were "pessimistic platitudes" and all-too familiar denials of the AfD's xenophobia. And his calls for less regulation and bureaucracy were plainly designed to boost his own business interests, said Stefan Fries on Deutschlandfunk (Berlin). Yet it was the Axel Springer group, which owns Die Welt, that allegedly approached him to write the piece in the first place. Why? Because Springer has been expanding into the US and sees Musk as vital to its interests there. So yes, for Die Welt to give house room to Musk's musings was a "journalistic error and a transgression"; but on the upside, it has sparked a debate about the cosy relationship between politics and business that is poisoning our democracy.

And nobody typifies this relationship more than Musk, said Lea Fauth in Die Tageszeitung (Berlin): he's the living embodiment of "personal profit, close contacts in politics, and massive influence on public opinion", yet he's lauded as an "anti-establishment" hero. No serious newspaper should publish anything by such a man, one notorious for spreading disinformation and "fake news" online.

Let's not over-dramatise, said Beatrice Achterberg in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zurich). Have those who see Musk's opinion as a sign of democracy's demise forgotten that the US businessman George Soros urged voters to back pro-European parties in 2019's EU elections? Or that Germany's Die Zeit published a piece by Vladimir Putin as recently as 2021? The fact is, it's completely normal for German newspapers to run guest articles by high-profile figures. As for the AfD, for too long it has benefitted from being treated as a pariah: doing so has simply burnished its anti-establishment credentials. So to go on trying to silence those who support the party will only serve to aid its cause further. You could say Musk has done us a favour