Friedrich Merz, the man in pole position to become Germany’s next chancellor, has condemned Elon Musk over his opinion article praising the far-right Alternative for Germany, calling it “overbearing and presumptuous”.
“I can’t remember a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country in the history of the western democracies,” Merz told the Funke media group on Sunday.
Merz’s remarks come after German newspaper Welt am Sonntag published an article by Musk describing the Alternative for Germany (AfD) as the “last spark of hope” for Germany.
The article has been widely criticised by MPs across the political spectrum as a clear instance of interference in German democratic processes less than two months before snap elections.
Polls have the AfD in second place behind Merz’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), with the Social Democrats (SPD) of Chancellor Olaf Scholz trailing in third place.
Mainstream parties in Germany revile the AfD, which has called for the mass deportation of people with immigrant backgrounds and wants Germany to exit the EU. Large parts of the party have been designated extremist by German domestic intelligence and placed under surveillance.
Saskia Esken, SPD co-leader, harshly criticised the Musk article. “Our democracy is capable of defending itself, and is not for sale,” she told Reuters.
“Whoever tries to influence our election from outside, whoever supports an anti-democratic, misanthropic party like the AfD . . . should expect fierce resistance from us,” she said.
Matthias Miersch, SPD general secretary, also attacked Axel Springer, the media conglomerate that owns Welt am Sonntag., saying it was “shameful and dangerous” that the company had provided Musk with a platform to campaign for the AfD.
Andreas Audretsch, a senior Green MP who is leading the party’s election campaign, also criticised Musk’s article.
“It damages our democracy when Herr Musk, the Chinese state or Moscow’s troll factories subvert our democratic discourse,” he said.
Welt comment editor Eva Marie Kogel announced over the weekend that she was resigning, in a sign of the anger the decision to publish the Musk piece generated in the paper’s newsroom.
“Journalism lives off independence and credibility, Die Welt lives off its reputation,” said Mika Beuster, head of the DJV, the German journalists’ association. “All of that is being thrown, with a great clatter, in the dustbin.”
In his article, Musk, a close adviser to US president-elect Donald Trump and a friend of Axel Springer chief executive Mathias Döpfner, praised the AfD’s policies of market deregulation, tax cuts and cutting red tape, as well as its opposition to immigration.
He also dismissed the idea that the party was “right-wing extremist”, noting that its co-leader, Alice Weidel, is in a same-sex relationship with a woman from Sri Lanka. “Does that sound to you like Hitler? Please!” he wrote.
Merz said Musk had “overlooked” a few important points in his article, saying he would never have been able to build his Tesla factory in the east German state of Brandenburg with the AfD. It was the far-right party that had, he said, “put up the fiercest opposition to the plant”.
He also noted that any Brexit-style withdrawal from the EU, as advocated by the AfD, would cause huge harm to the entire German economy, “not only the car industry”.
“You could recognise these relationships pretty easily provided you didn’t derive all your information from your own social media channels,” Merz said.
The AfD is the latest European hard-right organisation to win Musk’s support.
Nigel Farage recently suggested that Musk could donate to Reform UK, telling the BBC that his party was in “ongoing negotiations” with the tech mogul after the pair met at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Musk also waded into the spat between Farage and Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch, putting a fact-check alert on Badenoch’s tweets in which she claimed that Reform UK had faked its membership numbers.
Earlier this year, Musk praised Italy’s far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni, describing her as “someone who is even more beautiful on the inside than she is on the outside” and “authentic, honest and thoughtful”. She reciprocated by praising his “precious genius”.
Insiders at Axel Springer, which also owns Politico, rejected the claim that, by publishing the Musk article, they were providing a platform to the billionaire and the far right.
“He’s the owner of Twitter and with one tweet he can reach 200mn people,” said one. “Who is Welt to give him a platform? He is a platform. Better to publish this on our platform where we can guard it and flank it with our own opinion.”
