The tech hosted an online discussion with the far-right party’s leader Alice Weidel, an event the European Commission warned could have legal repercussions.
ADVERTISEMENTX owner Elon Musk invited Alice Weidel, leader of Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) onto his platform on Thursday evening for a discussion covering everything from energy policy to the party’s neo-Nazi associations — a chat the European Commission has said its watchdogs will be monitoring.
“Weidel is the leading candidate to run Germany,” Musk proclaimed at the start of the discussion, even though polls differ on whether she Weidel is in fact pulling ahead. A poll by public broadcaster ZDF on 20 December puts her in Weidel fourth place with 16% of the vote, the same figure as sitting Chancellor Olaf Scholz and behind rivals Friedrich Merz and Robert Habeck.
Meanwhile, the latest poll by YouGov on 8 January puts her party in second place, with 21% of the national vote. A recent Forsa poll shows the party polling around the same amount as this time last year, with 19%.
Other parties have ruled out the possibility of working with the AfD, meaning Weidel’s chance of becoming chancellor are all but zero.
In her discussion with Musk, Weidel wasted no time criticising former Chancellor Angela Merkel, in particular her decision to close Germany’s nuclear power plants.
“You don’t need to be very smart to realise that you cannot run an industrial country with just wind and solar,” Weidel said.
Musk responded by saying he is a fan of solar and wind energy but that there should be “some form” of fossil fuel energy and nuclear energy.
The two bonded over removing German bureaucratic hurdles as the discussion turned to Musk’s Tesla factory in Brandenburg, just outside of Berlin. “I had a lot of local support,” Musk said — though in reality, locals lodged over 400 objections to the opening of the plant when it was announced.
AfD politicians, in fact, were among the factory’s staunchest opponents: Lars Guenther, the then regional AfD candidate in Brandenburg, called the plant a “catastrophe for the people in this region”.
Meanwhile, Weidel repeated the AfD’s familiar stance of strict controls on immigration, something Musk is increasingly fixated on. She claimed that the German government is collecting record levels of income tax but “throwing money out the window” by assisting foreigners who are entering Germany.
Without citing a source for her statistic, she claimed that 57% of people arriving across Germany’s borders “throw away their passports”, appearing to conflate legal immigrants with asylum seekers who discard their passports upon arrival in an attempt to reduce the risk of immediate deportation.
As the discussion turned to Israel, Weidel asked Musk how he would solve the conflict in the Middle East, admitting she “didn’t know how she would solve this conflict”. Musk then asks if she supports the state of Israel to which Weidel said “Yes, of course.”
“Different to Nazis”
During the discussion between the pair, Weidel said her party stands for the opposite of what Hitler stood for, claiming Hitler was a “socialist” despite the Nazi leader being openly anti-communist.
“They state funded private companies and then they asked for huge taxes and nationalised the entire industry, and the biggest success after that terrible era in our history was to label Adolf Hitler as right and conservative, he was exactly the opposite,” she said.
The AfD has been rocked by scandals in recent years about its association with neo-Nazi organisations and symbols. Chairman of the AfD parliamentary group in the Thuringian state parliament Björn Höcke has been convicted twice for knowingly using a Nazi slogan at a rally.
ADVERTISEMENTThe party is classified as a suspected extremist organisation and its youth wing, which the party has tried to jettison, has been labelled an extremist group by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency.
Musk has come under fierce criticism from Germany’s political establishment for promoting the AfD. The German government described it as “interference” and some politicians compared Musk to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Musk left little up to the imagination on who he supported and how far he took the criticism seriously, telling his audience: “People need to get behind the AfD, or things are going to get very much worse for Germany.”
But so far, it is unclear whether Musk’s support for the AfD will have a tangible impact on Germany’s upcoming election.
ADVERTISEMENTIs the discussion legal?
The European Commission has included the conversation in its ongoing probe into X’s compliance with the Digital Services Act, the EU’s new digital rulebook designed to clean up social media platforms and protect users from online harm.
The commission has said Musk has the right to express his opinion, but that its watchdogs will be monitoring whether he is amplifying hate speech or pushing election misinformation.
On top of the EU’s concerns, German NGO Lobby Control have pointed out that Musk and Weidel’s discussion could constitute an illegal party donation under German law. Party donations from non-EU countries are prohibited in the country up to an amount of €1,000, a spokesperson from the Interior Ministry pointed out to Euronews.
“According to the Political Parties Act, which was reformed at the beginning of 2024, election advertising by third parties is considered a party donation,” Aurel Eschmann from Lobby Control said.
ADVERTISEMENT“The interview is expected to be played out much more broadly than posts from regular users. In this respect, one can definitely speak of political advertising here, because X usually sells such a reach for a lot of money.”