Elon Musk appears to be leaning even further into a full neo-Nazi embrace. Following his social media assault to block a congressional spending bill meant to avoid a government shutdown, the tech billionaire took to X and described the racist, far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as Germany’s last, best hope.
“Only the AfD can save Germany,” he posted on X early Friday. He was responding to Naomi Seibt, a young German right-wing influencer—the Washington Post dubbed her the anti-Greta Thunberg for her climate change denialism—whose caption in part read, “The presumptive next chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) is horrified by the idea that Germany should follow Elon Musk’s and Javier Milei’s example.” Similar to Argentina President Javier Milei’s “chainsaw” policies, Musk has promised $2 trillion in cuts to federal spending as co-lead of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Olaf Scholz, the current chancellor of Germany, dismissed Musk’s remarks in an unrelated press conference on Friday. “We have freedom of speech, and that also applies to multibillionaires,” Scholz said. “But freedom of speech also means that you can say things that are not right and do not contain good political advice.”
The AfD is controversial even among other European far-right parties because many of its leaders are not shy about expressing Nazi sympathies. In May, France’s far-right party led by Marine Le Pen split from the AfD in its European Parliament coalition after the German party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, said that a person was “not automatically a criminal” just because they had been a member of the SS, Adolph Hitlter’s paramilitary organization.
As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, many Germans consider the AfD party as ethnonationalists who want to mass deport all “unassimilated citizens” with non-German ethnic backgrounds. The country’s domestic intelligence agency designated the AfD as a “suspected extremist group” back in 2021 and is currently holding the party under observation.
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