Brussels – “Only the AfD can save Germany.” That was the gist of the controversial tête-à-tête between Elon Musk and the leader of the German far-right, Alice Weidel, held last night (Jan. 9) on the American tycoon’s X account. An appointment followed with concerned attention in Berlin and Brussels: Musk offered the campaigning party his 212 million-follower mouthful. With the risk that – as the platform’s owner – Musk could voluntarily amplify the content further by inserting a multiplier into X’s algorithm. However, in the end, numbers in hand, the livestream was followed by only about 200 thousand people.
Among them were “two or three” members of the European Commission staff working on implementing the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU law on digital services. As spokesman Thomas Regnier explained in the morning, the focus was not on the content itself but the “system put in place around the livestream.” For now, in that sense, the alarm seems to be over. However, concerns remain on the content of the conversation and the explicit meddling by a future US government aide in the campaign for the upcoming Feb. 23 German elections.
The dialogue between Musk and Weidel lasted over an hour, touching on several topics: from ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East to energy and education, from excessive bureaucracy in the German state to preventing illegal immigration. It reached unchartered waters, particularly when Weidel called Adolf Hitler an “anti-Semitic communist,” a “socialist spirit” misclassified as a conservative. Instead, the leader of Germany’s ultra-right called the AfD a “libertarian and conservative party, but negatively portrayed by the media as extremist,” even if some of its members and sections have long been under investigation by German authorities.
On the need to end the war in Ukraine, Musk assured that “President Trump will resolve that conflict very quickly,” making it clear, however, that “that’s up to Trump” and that he “doesn’t want to speak for him.” Asked by Weidel when he might “be ready to make human expeditions to Mars,” the SpaceX owner said he expects to send unmanned spacecraft to the red planet in about two years and manned ships in about four, with the goal that someday “Martians” will be able to rescue Earthlings “when there is an emergency, just like America saved Europe in World War II.”
Musk repeated twice during the livestream that “only the AfD can save Germany,” urging people to vote for Weidel’s party. For the past few weeks, the American billionaire openly sided with the AfD, going so far as to call the president of the German Republic, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a “tyrant” and publishing an editorial endorsing the AfD in a German newspaper. According to polls, the ultra-right formation is already at around 21 percent, behind only the conservatives of the CDU. In the June European elections, it had achieved a surprising result with 16 percent of the vote, bringing as many as 14 MEPs to Brussels and establishing the rightmost group on the political spectrum in the European Parliament, Europe of Sovereign Nations.
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
