FRANKFURT: A post from Elon Musk on his platform X that only the far-right AfD party can “save Germany” sparked accusations Friday that he was seeking to interfere in the country’s upcoming polls.
The tech billionaire posted the message over a video commentary that criticised the leader of Germany’s CDU party Friedrich Merz, on course to become the next chancellor, for his refusal to work with the AfD.
The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) has enjoyed a surge in the polls, and is currently second-placed, but mainstream parties have ruled out cooperating with it.
While the German government refused to be drawn on the comments by Musk, set to be “efficiency czar” under US President-elect Donald Trump, politicians from major parties reacted with outrage.
“It is threatening, irritating and unacceptable for a key figure in the future US government to interfere in the German election campaign,” Dennis Radtke, an MEP for the centre-right CDU, told the Handelsblatt daily.
Germans are set to go to the polls on February 23 after the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition last month in a row over the budget.
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Musk was a “threat to democracy in the Western world”, Radtke added, accusing the world’s richest man of turning X, previously called Twitter, into a “disinformation slingshot”.
Alex Schaefer, a lawmaker from Scholz’s centre-left SPD party, said Musk’s post was “completely unacceptable”.
“We are very close to the Americans, but now bravery is required towards our friend. We object to interference in our election campaign,” Schaefer told the Tagesspiegel daily.
The AfD however celebrated Musk’s praise in its own X message, which said “millions of people have long recognised this – and the number is growing”.
The German government was reluctant to be drawn into commenting on Musk’s post, with a spokeswoman telling a regular press conference in Berlin that “freedom of expression also applies to X”.
But the spokeswoman, Christiane Hoffmann, added the government was worried about “how X has developed in recent years, especially since Elon Musk took over”.
Despite such concerns, the government had decided not to close their accounts on the platform as it remained “an important medium for reaching and informing people”, she said.
It is not the first time Musk has weighed in on German politics.
Last month he tweeted in German that “Olaf is a fool” after the collapse of Scholz’s government.
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