Elon Musk boosts German far right party with live event on X
The publicity was a potential boon for AfD, which has been frozen out of mainstream politics in part because its leaders have downplayed Nazi atrocities.
Elon Musk held a live event on his social media platform X on Thursday with a leader of the German anti-immigrant, far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD), the latest step in the tech billionaire’s campaign to rally support behind reactionary candidates across Europe and North America.
Musk, the wealthiest person in the world, spent more than an hour speaking with Alice Weidel, co-leader of AfD, giving the anti-immigrant party a high-profile boost ahead of the national elections scheduled for next month.
The free publicity from Musk was a potential boon for AfD, which has been frozen out of mainstream German politics, in part, because its leaders have downplayed Nazi atrocities. The country’s domestic intelligence agencies are monitoring the AfD for extremism, and a German court upheld the surveillance last year, finding that some AfD members favor a two-tier society in which “ethnic” Germans are given more rights than people from immigrant backgrounds.
The conversation between Musk and Weidel was generally friendly, a dynamic that Weidel said was unusual for her.
“It’s a completely new situation for me that I just can have a normal conversation and I’m not interrupted or negatively framed,” she said. She called Musk a “visionary.”
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