When Alice Weidel, leader of the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, joins her supporter Elon Musk in a livestreamed conversation on the billionaire’s platform X on Thursday, she will have a 24-year-old German antivaxer and climate sceptic to thank.
Naomi Seibt, from Münster in northwest Germany, is being credited for Musk’s recent endorsement of the populist, Russia-friendly, anti-immigrant party which he recently called Germany’s “last spark of hope”.
Seibt, a freelance journalist and activist with almost 370,000 followers on X, has been in online contact with the world’s richest man a number of times since he noticed a tweet she posted in June last year before the European elections saying: “My name is Naomi Seibt and I’m voting AfD.”
He replied to that post by asking her what was going on with the AfD because every time he heard about the party, he got negative feedback and was told it was dangerous.
Seibt described Elon Musk as “basically still a small child” but said he would take humanity to Mars
GUGLIELMO MANIAPANE/REUTERS
“For the first time, I had been noticed by someone who really had influence. I realised that I had to explain to him why I support the AfD,” Seibt told Berliner Zeitung. “So I started answering his questions in videos in English, which I published on my X account. At the time, I was the only German who made this kind of content available internationally. I had an absolutely unique selling point.”
Seibt, who now lives in the United States and has been dubbed an anti-Greta Thunberg in Germany for her views on climate change, said she also had private online chats with Musk. “He also sent me memes. He loves memes. He’s basically still a small child, but incredibly intelligent. One day he’ll take us to Mars.”
Seibt said she told Musk, 53, that the AfD, which is classified as a suspected far-right extremist organisation by the German domestic intelligence agency, reminded her of the origins of the country’s 19th-century revolutionary movement.
Alice Weidel described Germans as “slaves” and a “defeated people”
FILIP SINGER/EPA
Before a general election in six weeks’ time, following the collapse of the German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition, the AfD is polling in second place at 19 per cent, behind the conservative CDU/CSU bloc at 32 per cent, the Forsa polling institute said on Wednesday.
Over the past week Weidel, 45, has been counting down on X to her high-profile conversation with Musk, due to start at 6pm GMT on Thursday. She set the tone this week, describing him as “entrepreneurial genius” with a “burning love for free speech”.
However, she also drew criticism for describing Germans as “slaves” and a “defeated people” in an interview with a US magazine.
Weidel told The American Conservative that Germany had lost its independence and was dominated by the US which she described as “the shining winner of history”.
While the US had benefited from that arrangement, so had Germany, she added. “Being a slave also has advantages. It is the noblest right of a servant not to take part in his master’s battles, but to enjoy peace.”
She accused the conservative Christian Democrats, leading in opinion polls before the February 23 election, of a “vulgar war cry” in promoting military support for Ukraine.
“What we see here are, really and truly, the wild sexual fantasies of impotent people. We will end this grotesque charade as quickly as possible,” she said.
An AfD election rally in Mannheim in June last year. The party is in second place in the polls before the election next month
THOMAS LOHNES/GETTY IMAGES
Commentators in Germany said her remarks echoed the stance of the far-right Reich Citizen movement that argues that the post-war German state is not sovereign. The best-selling tabloid Bild accused her of lacking patriotism.
“Patriots don’t belittle their country. Anyone who claims to want to lead their country as a patriot does not declare its inhabitants to be slaves,” the newspaper said.
In the interview, Weidel had adopted the pro-Russian, US-sceptic rhetoric of the most radical wing of the AfD represented by Björn Höcke, the leader of AfD in Thuringia, Bild added.
Bild said that until now she had deliberately avoided talking like this, but she now needed to because her public flirtations with Donald Trump and Musk were not popular among AfD supporters in eastern Germany, where the party is strongest.
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Seibt, who inspired the AfD leader’s biggest global publicity appearance yet through Musk’s platform, said she did not regard herself or the AfD as right-wing extremists. However, she did admit to being a friend of Martin Sellner, a leader of the ethno-nationalist Identitarian movement who has been barred from entering the UK and other countries over his views.
The journalist did acknowledge that some comments by AfD politicians were a “bit insensitive” when confronted with a remark by Alexander Gauland, the former AfD leader, who described the Holocaust as “a bird shit of history”.
“But I don’t want to have to personally account for the Holocaust. I have nothing to do with it. My grandparents have nothing to do with it. In my opinion, it’s also not right that the whole of Germany is still stigmatised today,” she said.
“Nevertheless, the topic must be dealt with politically and antisemitism must be discussed. But we let thousands of Islamists into this country every year, the worst antisemites. Many Jews are afraid of these Islamists.”
In a tweet, she said Weidel’s event with Musk was a revival of free speech. “Germany must give the AfD a chance to govern as the voice of the people. Support for the authoritarian left establishment is entirely manufactured by brainwashing via the media and NGOs,” she wrote. “Both are funded by psychopath George Soros and extinctionist Bill Gates.”
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