The Musk effect

Ahmed Mustafa , Tuesday 14 Jan 2025

Trump’s confidant Elon Musk has been providing unofficial support to far-right groups in the UK, Germany, Italy and elsewhere

The Musk effect

 

Tech billionaire-turned-politician Elon Musk is focusing his efforts on pushing disruptive change in Europe after his support of Donald Trump secured the US election in November. Musk is using his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) to support extremist, far-right parties across the continent, to whom he has promised financial support.

Musk is trying to copy what he did last year, donating 260 million dollars to the Donald Trump campaign, hosting him in a propaganda interview on X and posting calls to vote for Trump. He was rewarded with a government post in the Trump administration and political influence as the president’s close personal adviser.

European analysts and commentators question whether Musk’s campaign to disrupt European democracies and bring extremist far-right groups to power will work in the same way in Germany or the UK. Some expect a backlash “that could deliver the far right setbacks rather than more victories”, as Berlin-based writer and author Paul Hockenos wrote in an article in Time magazine this week.

A few days ago, Elon Musk hosted the German AfD (Alternative for Germany) leader and candidate for Chancellor in the next month’s election Alice Weidel, whose party is second in the polls but has almost no chance of forming a government due to other parties’ refusal to work with it.

Meanwhile, Musk continues his attack on UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, calling for the ousting of his Labour government that has been in power for only a few months. He is inclined to provide financial support to the British far-right party Reform led by the controversial figure Nigel Farage. He has regularly praised far-right European politicians from Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni to France’s Marie Le-Pen.

Musk’s attacks on Starmer are the most remarkable, however, calling for him to be thrown in jail for allegedly covering up “grooming gangs” – a case of abuse by Asian gangs that took place years ago when Starmer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service. The case shook Britain at the time and far-right and anti-immigration politicians have exploited it for their cause.

Most of the British political elite and even ordinary citizens are against the attack. “Musk’s intervention is odd. He seems to have become obsessed with the UK, but he’s also apparently not grasped the country’s issues well. He’s listening to ignorant bigots like Douglas Murray. To problematise South Asians in the UK would be a disaster. They have become part of the country’s fabric over a century. But he’s also turning on Nigel Farage which is odd in that Trump is close to him. Even worse, he thinks Tommy Robinson – an ignorant thug in the pay of the Israelis – is an alternative,” Andrew Hammond of Oxford University told Al-Ahram Weekly, referring to recent posts by Musk criticising Farage and saying he is not fit to rule the UK.

In Germany, Musk’s adoption of extremists is also at odds with his neoliberal views. “Musk misunderstands the AfD. The billionaire Tesla founder has praised AfD’s economic agenda but while it touts a neoliberal line, it does so softly and this is not the source of its votes. The eastern Germans, in particular, blame free-market policies for their post-unification travails. The AfD doesn’t win 30 per cent of the vote in eastern Germany because of its economic prescriptions, which are not written in bold at the top of their programme, but rather in spite of them,” as Hockenos wrote in his Time article.

The focus on the UK and Germany is causing anger among the rest of Europe. Musk justifies his meddling in the German elections by the fact that he invested billions of dollars in the country. His electric car company Tesla has a mega factory outside Berlin. As for the UK, most Americans think they have a vested interest in what is going on there, not only because of the so-called special relationship between Washington and London but because they see Britain as more closely linked to the US than Europe.

European leaders are furious, comparing Elon Musk’s meddling to what they consider Russian or Chinese attacks on Western democracies – which include utilising the internet to misinform the public in the same way Musk uses X platform. Musk named German Chancellor Olaf Scholz an “incompetent fool” in one of his posts, which garnered a direct reaction from the chancellor who warned bluntly, “Hands off our democracy, Mr Musk”. The UK prime minister didn’t name Musk when he said: “Those who are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible are not interested in victims, they’re interested in themselves.”

Other leaders have also responded angrily. France’s President Emmanuel Macron said: “Ten years ago, who would have believed it, if we had been told that the owner of one of the biggest social media networks in the world would support a new, international reactionary movement and intervene directly in elections, including in Germany’s?” Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said he found it “worrying that a man with considerable access to social networks and significant economic resources is so directly involved in the internal affairs of other countries”. Spain’s government spokeswoman, Pilar Alegría, said digital platforms such as X should act with “absolute neutrality and above all without any kind of interference”.

These reactions have not deterred the controversial billionaire. On the contrary, he is doubling down and raising the tone of his attacks and support for far-right extremists in Europe. Whether this will have a negative impact on the US-EU relations, which are already strained by Trumps’ expected trade war with the continent, is yet to be seen.

 

* A version of this article appears in print in the 16 January, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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