After the dissolution of the German Parliament last week, new legislative elections will take place in February to choose the new chancellor who will succeed Olaf Scholz. Until then, the proximity between Elon Musk and the AfD, a far-right party, worries the German political class.
American billionaire Elon Musk “trying to influence the elections” German legislative elections scheduled for the end of February with its repeated support for the far-right AfD party, the German government said on Monday. “Elon Musk is trying to influence the federal elections with his statements”declared Christiane Hoffmann, deputy government spokesperson, during a regular press briefing.
“He is free to express his opinion,” but this is equivalent, she stressed, to “an electoral recommendation for a party that is monitored” by German domestic intelligence, “because he is suspected of being far-right” and has already “been recognized” by justice as such.
A forum which had been strongly criticized by other parties but also journalists' associations, denouncing a “election advertising” of the newspaper. Even the new editor-in-chief of the newspaper declared that “Even a genius can make a mistake.”
The AfD, a far-right party under surveillance
This qualification in Germany for a political movement can justify police surveillance due to fears of undermining the constitutional order. On Saturday, the daily Welt published a cross-article in which the boss of X, spaceX and Tesla assures that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is “the last glimmer of hope” for Germany. He estimates “clearly false” its classification as far right.
The richest man in the world reaffirmed a position already expressed on December 20 in a tweet which had created unease in the country in the midst of the election campaign. The AfD is credited with an average of 19% of voting intentions in the polls, second behind the conservative opposition, in the lead with 32%.
The embarrassment in Germany is commensurate with the growing influence that the multibillionaire seems to have over the future Trump presidency, in which he is to take the helm of the “Department of Government Effectiveness”.
Scholz's party compares him to Vladimir Putin
On November 8, he had already called the Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz a “fou”, in the wake of the breakup of the government coalition. And on December 20, after the car-ramming attack on the Magdeburg Christmas market, he called it“incompetent fool” and called on him to resign.
“Freedom of expression also includes the greatest absurdities,” judged its spokesperson Christiane Hoffmann on this subject. The president of the Social Democratic Party, Lars Klingbeil, compared Elon Musk's behavior to that of Russian President Vladimir Putin: “both want Germany to be weakened and plunged into chaos”.
Well placed to become the next chancellor, conservative Friedrich Merz also castigated Elon Musk's pro-AfD column, deemed “intrusive and pretentious”. “I don’t remember that, in the history of Western democracies, there has been a comparable case of interference in the electoral campaign of a friendly country”declared the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to the newspapers of the Funke group, known for its very Atlantic positions.
