The tech billionaire is interfering in elections across Europe, and his new pro-AFD move is evidence that he is determined to undermine democracy in a country that knows more than anyone who can bring in a far-right dictatorship. writes John Kampfner.
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While the Germans went to a screwed year, I remembered an episode a decade ago that then seemed absurd, and now puts me in their prescience.
He was presiding over an Internet Convention in Berlin, sponsored through Google, when one of the participants advised the German government to create an internet public company. Silicon Valley, said fervently, is the sustenance of United States superfores and cannot be trusted that he tells the facts or maintain democracy.
I didn’t mind the idea, though I was too polite to say so. Half of his research was, and still is, incredibly outdated and ridiculous. The perception of the State invoked to provide an online platform for observation and data. – in the same land of Goebbels and the Stasi – credulity overflows. But I have to admit that the speaker foresaw Elon Musk’s malignancy long before I did, or anyone I know.
Musk drives a hammer through politics in Germany, at its most delicate, and enjoys the concern he attributes to it. The more colorful his insults (uttered through X, his personal fiefdom), the more indigenous the political elegance. it is his purpose and that of his boss, Donald Trump.
What position to undermine democracy than in a country obsessed with constitutional decorum?
Musk labelled Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, “an incompetent fool”. In another post, he labelled him “Olaf Schitz”. He has sprayed denunciations of all the other mainstream parties. But it was his most recent attack on the head of state, president Frank-Walter Steinmeier, that has caused the most offence, calling the supposed custodian of democracy “an anti-democratic tyrant”.
In theory, everyone has the right to sue it. German’s law weighs freedom of expression opposite to the right not to be insulted in public. The Criminal Code is a complete category of “honor murders”, incorporating insults, slander, defamation and the propagation of false statements that cause damage, monetary loss or emotional anguish.
All this would play in Musk and his self -proclaimed by “freedom of expression. ” In any case, any fine would make a small dent in his wallet.
What’s far more damaging is Elon Musk’s openness to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. With the party coming in second place in polls ahead of parliamentary elections on 23 February, it appears in the pages of the usually respectable conservative AfD newspaper. Welt am Sonntag and all that it stands for (remigration, ethnic nationalism and Europhobia) counts. . . Not because of Musk’s political acumen, but because of his control of social media.
The richest guy in the world has a political and economic program in Gerguyy. In his remark in the newspaper a few days ago, he congratulated AFD on its plans to “decrease government over-regulation, lower taxes and get the market out of control. “A Tesla factory in the Brandenburg region, east of Berlin, is its first electric car factory in Europe and would gain advantages from any deregulation.
“Germany’s election is the last spark of hope for this country,” Musk wrote in his translated comment.
He went on to say the far-right party “can lead the country into a future where economic prosperity, cultural integrity and technological innovation are not just wishes, but reality”.
Musk’s remark temporarily led to the resignation of the newspaper’s newspaper editor, Eva Marie Kogel, while Lars Klingbeil, chairman of Scholz’s Social Democrats, who is dragging far in third place, accused Musk of “diving into chaos in Germany,” compared him to Vladimir Putin.
The less optimistic situation is that Musk is tapping into a simmering frustration with liberal democracy in Germany, just as he and Trump are doing in the UK.
Both Scholz and Friedrich Merz, the leader of the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the man most likely to succeed him at the chancellery, have criticised Musk. But they have chosen their words carefully. “You, the citizens, decide what happens in Germany,” Scholz said in his new year’s address. “It’s not up to the owners of social media.”
Their measured tones mask a growing sense of alarm. The terrorist attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg demonstrated continued vulnerability to such incidents – although nobody is immune, as the latest attack in New Orleans attests. It also opened the door to yet more denunciations of immigrants, of “the other”.
And Germany, from all places, where such hostility can drive.
The AfD may have edged up a percentage point or so, but it remains at 20 per cent – a still-remarkable achievement. The CDU remains above 30 per cent, while the SPD, Greens and others languish.
A “firewall” agreed upon by the main parties remains in place, ensuring no cooperation or coalition discussions with the AfD or other extremist groupings at national level, though locally that has started to fray.
The positive situation is that the German electorate is no longer willing to be told what to do by American marketers than it was a decade ago, and that Musk’s rapprochement with the AFD will make little difference. The maximum election result is still a Merz/CDU Coalition with the SPD or the Greens, or both.
The least positive thing is that Musk is exploiting a latent frustration with liberal democracy in Germany, just as he and Trump are doing in the United Kingdom, with his for Nigel Farage and in France, with Marine Le Pen.
The Germans are already petrified at the idea that Trump takes possession within two weeks. The question then is to what extent the 47th president of the United States, a name that once brought the label of “leader of the free world”, will be willing to undermine democracy in a country that knows more than how far it will come. Can you take the intelligent dictatorship?
As election campaigns in Germany tend to spring the odd surprise, there is ample time for Musk and his ilk to damage a liberal democracy that over the last eight decades has been so painstakingly built.
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