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Elon Musk heaped praise on the “very reasonable” co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany as she joined the technology billionaire for a discussion about Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump and the existence of aliens.
In the latest attempt by the world’s richest man to influence European politics, Musk hosted Alice Weidel for a conversation on his social media platform X and “strongly recommended” that Germans back the AfD in federal elections on February 23.
He said: “I think Alice Weidel is a very reasonable person and hopefully people can tell just from this conversation . . . nothing outrageous has been proposed — just common sense.”
At its peak, about 200,000 people tuned into Musk’s 75-minute long livestream on X with Weidel, which was falsely billed as “a conversation with the leading candidate to run Germany”.
The AfD, large parts of which have been classified by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency as right-wing extremist, is polling at about 19 per cent and is on track for a second-place finish in the elections in Europe’s largest country — a result that would be its best performance in a national vote.
However, respected pollsters put Friedrich Merz and his centre-right Christian Democrats in the lead, on about 31 per cent.
Weidel, who is the AfD’s candidate for chancellor, repeatedly thanked Musk for the opportunity to speak without being “interrupted or negatively framed” — a situation she said was “completely new”.
She strived to portray her party, which has called for the mass deportation of people with immigrant backgrounds, as “conservative libertarian”.
Musk, who has drawn criticism from European leaders for meddling in German politics as well as in the UK, invited Weidel to refute comparisons between her party and the Nazis.
This prompted a discussion in which both host and guest argued that Hitler was not rightwing but rather a socialist.
That claim, popular among far-right groups, is rejected by historians who say the German fascist movement that oversaw the murder of 6mn Jews — as well as large numbers of Roma, disabled people, gays and communists — had little to do with socialism despite branding itself the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
One of the AfD’s most prominent politicians, the firebrand Björn Höcke, has been convicted and fined for using banned Nazi slogans.
Musk’s backing of the far-right party represents an extraordinary intervention in the German election campaign by a key confidant of US president-elect Trump.
It has deeply unsettled mainstream parties in Germany, as well as prompted renewed debate in Brussels about whether X and its owner are breaching the EU’s digital rules by meddling in politics and amplifying accounts that spread disinformation and extremist views.
The platform had about 4mn monthly active users in Germany in December, according to data from Similarweb, a digital market intelligence company.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz — whom Musk has described as “an incompetent fool” — has responded to the Tesla chief executive’s interventions by stressing the need to “stay cool” and not “feed the troll”.
But Merz described a recent article by Musk, outlining his support for the far-right, as an unprecedented “case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country”.
The conversation between Musk and Weidel gradually morphed from a discussion of core AfD themes, including migration, taxation and the virtues of nuclear power, into an appeal from the politician to the serial entrepreneur to expound his views on the Middle East conflict, Mars, the existence of aliens and whether or not he believed in God.
Weidel also said she had felt “physical pain” at how the German media and politicians had treated Trump during the US presidential election campaign and expressed hope he would end the conflict in Ukraine.
She also praised Musk for his “beautiful words” and his “vision”.
Additional reporting by Clara Murray and Javier Espinoza