Friedrich Merz, the man in pole position to become Germany's next chancellor, has slammed Elon Musk for his opinion piece praising the far-right Alternative for Germany, calling it “encouraging and presumptuous”.
“I don't remember a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country in the history of 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 it Alternative for Germany (AfD) as “the last glimmer of hope” for Germany.
The article was widely criticized by MPs across the political spectrum as a clear example of interference in Germany's democratic processes less than two months before snap elections.
According to polls, the AfD is in second place behind Merz's centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), with Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats (SPD) in third.
Mainstream parties in Germany are reviling the AfD, which has called for mass deportations of people with immigrant backgrounds and wants Germany to leave the EU. Large sections of the party were labeled extremists by German domestic intelligence and were monitored.
Saskia Esken, co-chair of the SPD, sharply criticized it Musk article. “Our democracy is able to defend itself and is not for sale,” she told Reuters.
“Anyone who tries to influence our elections from the outside, who supports an anti-democratic, misanthropic party like the AfD. . . should expect a strong backlash from us,” she said.
Matthias Miersch, general secretary of the SPD, also attacked Axel Springer, the media conglomerate that owns Welt am Sonntag.
Andreas Audretsch, a senior Greens MP who is leading the party's election campaign, also criticized Musk's article.
“It damages our democracy when Mr. Musk, the Chinese state, or the Moscow troll factories subvert our democratic discourse,” he said.
Welt comments editor Eva Marie Kogel announced over the weekend that she was resigning in a sign of the anger the decision to publish Musk has sparked in the newspaper's editorial board.
“Journalism lives on independence and credibility, Die Welt lives on its reputation,” said Mika Beuster, head of the DJV, Germany's union of journalists. “It's all thrown into the dustbin with a big bang.”
In his article Musk, a close adviser to the newly elected US President Donald Trump aa a friend of Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfnerhe praised the AfD's policies of market deregulation, tax cuts and bureaucracy, as well as its opposition to immigration.
He also rejected the idea that the party was “right-wing extremist”, noting that its co-chair Alice Weidel is in a same-sex relationship with a Sri Lankan woman. “Does that sound like Hitler to you? Please!” he wrote.
Merz said Musk had “overlooked” several important points in his article, saying he would never have been able to build his Tesla factory in the AfD-affiliated East German state of Brandenburg. It was the far-right party that, according to him, “put up the strongest resistance against the power plant.”
He also noted that any Brexit-style exit from the EU, as advocated by the AfD, would cause huge damage to the entire German economy, “not just the car industry”.
“You could spot these relationships pretty easily, assuming you weren't deriving all of your information from your own social media feeds,” Merz said.
The AfD is the latest European hard-right organization to receive Musk's support.
Nigel Farage recently suggested Musk could make a donation to Reform UK, telling the BBC his party was “in talks” 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, drawing attention to fact-checking Badenoch's tweets in which she claimed Reform UK had falsified its membership figures.
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 “rare genius”.
Insiders at Axel Springer, which also owns Politico, rejected claims that publishing Musk's article was providing a platform for billionaires and the far right.
“He owns Twitter and can reach 200 million people with one tweet,” said one of them. “Who is Welt to give him a platform? He is the platform. It's better to publish it on our platform where we can monitor it and add our own opinion.”
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Friedrich Merz attacks Elon Musk's article praising Germany's far-right AfD
