Elon Musk Trolls His Way Through Europe

Last week, Elon Musk invited Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland, for a conversation on his platform, X, formerly known as Twitter. The more than hour-long chat was friendly, as Musk had already endorsed the AfD as the only party that “can save Germany.” The chat was also pretty weird. It covered things you might expect like migration and the “woke mind virus“ and things you might not, like why Hitler was a communist (not sure the communists persecuted under Hitler’s regime would agree) and the existence of God. So, you know, a very normal thing for a billionaire tech mogul with business interests in Germany and direct access to the U.S. president and a chancellor candidate to do a month before Germany’s federal elections.

German and European officials have decried Musk’s endorsements as “election interference,” and German government ministries have suspended use of some of their accounts on the X platform. About 150 EU officials tuned into the conversation to see if the Weidel conversation violated the EU’s tech rules. 

As a piece of actual campaign propaganda, Musk’s conversation probably didn’t do much: the interview was in English, after all, and only about 200,000 people tuned in. Weidel went through her long list of grievances with the German political establishment, but this wasn’t exactly a pitch to win over voters. It was an awkward little love-fest. 

But Musk’s decision to give Weidel an unchallenged platform does help legitimize the AfD – which other far-right European parties have seen as too extreme to work with – especially among global audiences. It also shows how much power Musk has to influence the political agenda everywhere – in the U.S., in Europe, and who knows where else. He can do this because he’s incredibly rich, he can do this because he is a key ally of the new U.S. president, and he can do this because he controls a platform that can promote or throttle whatever information he wants.

Musk’s meddling is not limited to Germany, either. In the United Kingdom, Musk has revived a years-old grooming scandal, accusing Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer and members of his government of covering up the scandal. An independent inquiry and report were released in 2014, and a seven-year investigation into child abuse in England and Wales was concluded in 2022, though its recommendations have yet to be implemented – not under the previous Conservative government or the current Labour government. Some families are critical of the inquiry and want more done, but it was not a dominant political issue until Musk got involved. Musk also called on King Charles to dissolve parliament and order a new general election, and he even posted a poll asking if America should “liberate the people of Britain.” Starmer had to publicly address the “misinformation” around the scandal, though he didn’t mention Musk by name. 

On the one hand, this all seems like some bizarre political sideshow. On the other, the bizarre political sideshow is becoming the show. “In countries where public opinion does play into governing priorities, that’s absolutely going to have an effect,” said Michael Mirer, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who studies media and communication. 

As with the grooming scandal in the U.K., it wasn’t really news until Musk thought about it, and then he was able to push it as a news event. “So Elon set the agenda, in that case, and forced everybody to respond to it,” Mirer said.

This, to some degree, is not all that new – there are powerful people who set the agenda, and those people and their agenda get news coverage. And again, Musk can manipulate an echo chamber around himself through X, where a lot of politicians and journalists still live. But this is also a guy doing the YMCA at Mar-a-Lago with the next president of the United States. That makes him pretty difficult to ignore – both for those he’s targeting and for the political opposition and their media ecosystem who want to exploit this for political gain. 

In the U.K., a YouGov survey found that most Brits – 57 percent – do not trust Musk on the issue of grooming gangs, though they also don’t trust their current political leaders on this – of any party. The story itself is unquestionably horrific, and Labour’s stance – to implement the recommendations from the inquiry, rather than start a new one – has failed to quell the calls for a new inquiry. Which means Musk has done the damage even as people are well-aware that he is a troll and a menace. (A More in Common Survey found that 50 percent of Brits see Musk as a threat to democracy.) 

Even Musk’s allies are not immune. Musk has apparently turned on his buddy Nigel Farage of the right-wing Reform UK. Farage refused to embrace Tommy Robinson, a far-right activist currently in prison for libel against a Syrian refugee. Musk wants Robinson freed. Farage has brushed off the disagreement, but some Reform UK members quit the party in protest over Farage’s leadership. However this plays out, it shows the riskiness of dealing with Musk. You benefit from his disruption, until you don’t. 

In Germany, three-quarters of respondents in a recent survey said Musk’s interventions in German politics were inappropriate. The AfD is polling at about 20 percent in the election polls, a stubbornly high second place. But all of Germany’s mainstream parties – including the likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) – have ruled out working with the AfD because of their extremism and radical policies. 

Yet voters know about this firewall, and a fifth may still vote for the AfD anyway. Weidel has embraced a mass deportation plan in her party’s platform, referring to it as “remigration” – a controversial term that she and her party once shied away from after it came up in a meeting some AfD members had with actual neo-Nazis last year, which also sparked mass protests. That Weidel is now using it in her campaign is a sign that she feels safe from politically damaging backlash. Which means the AfD doesn’t have to win this election, or even come to power, to influence German politics. It just has to keep hanging around, normalizing what was once politically toxic, and Musk and his platform is a useful tool toward that end. 

Donald Trump is the unspoken factor in all of Musk’s meddling. There is a lot of talk about his transactional nature, and his love of tariffs, but no one knows exactly what this next Trump administration will seek to do, and what figures like Musk will mean to it, and how they will wield their influence. Trump is over here talking about taking Greenland. Musk is tweeting at the British monarch to dissolve the democratically elected Parliament. But for those on the receiving end, it’s  not entirely clear where the troll ends and the efforts to reshape the regimes of foreign countries earnestly begins.