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Alice WeidelADADADUKADCDU AD “ADYour browser does not support the element. could hardly have hoped for better publicity. With federal elections due on February 23rd, Ms Weidel is running for chancellor as co-head of the hard-right Alternative for Germany (f) party. In an op-ed on December 29th in the Sunday edition of , a conservative paper, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a confidant of Donald Trump, called the f “the last spark of hope” for Germany. The country, he claimed, is “teetering on the brink of economic and cultural collapse”. He had a right to speak out about German politics, he said, because he has invested heaps of money in the country. (A multibillion-dollar plant in Brandenburg producing cars and batteries for Tesla, his electric carmaker, opened in 2022.)The f is polling at 19%, putting it second behind the centre-right alliance of the Christian Democratic Union and Bavaria’s Christian Social Union, at about 30%. It is not the first hard-right European party to attract Mr Musk’s support: earlier in 2024 he praised Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister. Mr Musk said she was “even more beautiful on the inside than she is on the outside”. She in turn called him a “precious genius”. He is said to be considering a donation to Britain’s anti-immigrant Reform party.Mr Musk’s love-note to the f may have been counterproductive. It certainly incensed Germany’s leaders, already anxious about Mr Trump’s second term in office. “I can’t remember a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country in the history of the Western democracies,” said Friedrich Merz, the leader and chancellor candidate, on December 29th. Olaf Scholz, the current chancellor and candidate for the Social Democrats, noted in his New Year’s Eve speech that Germany’s fate is decided by its citizens, not “by the owners of social media”. Mr Musk owns X, a social-media platform. His recent posts there have been childishly offensive: one called Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president, an “anti-democratic tyrant”; another called the chancellor “Oaf Schitz”.The op-ed editor of Eva Marie Kogel, quit in protest after Mr Musk’s article was published. The piece had been accompanied by a rebuttal by Jan Philipp Burgard, the paper’s incoming editor-in-chief, calling Mr Musk “fatally wrong”. The rebuttal’s headline calls the fpartly xenophobic and antisemitic”; Mr Burgard also blasts its anti-Americanism and its endorsement of leaving the European Union. Yet like Ms Kogel, many Germans found it wrong to have run Mr Musk’s piece at all.Mr Musk’s op-ed was poorly argued. Yet the furore around its publishing seems unexpectedly to have shaped the early phase of the campaign. In the long run this may not prove terribly important: social-media algorithms, misinformation and Russian influence campaigns could have far more impact, as Michael Hanfeld, a German pundit, argued in the a daily. But for the moment, the affair has had the odd effect of aligning the f with an American oligarch, making the Alternative for Germany seem slightly un-German.
