As Musk amps up his support for the far right, Europe pushes back
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Ned Temko Columnist
| London
European leaders are still hopeful that they can forge a working relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump. But they are alarmed about the new administration’s X factor: the president’s billionaire backer and close ally, Elon Musk.
And they are increasingly convinced that they need to counter Mr. Musk’s efforts to promote a Trump-style overhaul of European politics.
Their immediate concern is his use of the social media platform he owns – X, formerly Twitter – to back far-right politicians, especially in Germany, which is going to the polls next month.
Why We Wrote This
Elon Musk is making himself unpopular among mainstream European politicians by openly supporting their extreme right-wing rivals. His social media platform, X, is under investigation by EU officials for potential bias.
Yet they also harbor two deeper, longer-term worries.
The first is that his barbed interventions could signal the full-scale arrival in Europe of the kind of online venom, misinformation, and conspiracy theories – and the angry polarization – that have poisoned American politics.
The second is that with Mr. Trump’s support, X and other U.S. tech giants such as Facebook and Google could prove rich and powerful enough to evade or undermine the European Union’s groundbreaking Big Tech regulations. Those laws constrain unsafe or incendiary online content, and algorithms that could skew election campaigns.
Since Mr. Trump is unlikely to regulate the tech giants in America, that would give them free rein across the Western world.
The problem European leaders face is how to respond to Mr. Musk. When his far-right cheerleading began, during anti-immigrant riots in Britain last year, they were reluctant to get into a sparring match, for fear of undermining their efforts to build bridges with Mr. Trump. That concern increased when Mr. Trump won the U.S. election.
Now, however, the mood is changing. European leaders have begun to denounce Mr. Musk’s intervention in European politics.
And while the EU’s central executive bodies still seem more reticent, they, too, are showing signs of concern. Last week, the European Commission stepped up its investigation into X’s content-moderation tools.
The first sign of the shift came when Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, responded to a series of attacks from Mr. Musk by denouncing “lies and misinformation.”
Yet the main catalyst has been Mr. Musk’s support for the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, ahead of elections on Feb. 23.
With its links to neo-Nazi groups, the AfD is on German intelligence agencies’ extremism watch list. Yet like other anti-immigration parties in Europe, it has been gaining support.
Polls suggest the center-right Christian Democratic Union is likely to lead the next coalition government. But the AfD is expected to take second place, with around 20% of the vote, ahead of the center-left Social Democrats whose ruling coalition collapsed last year.
As well as sharing pro-AfD messages with his 215 million followers on X, Mr. Musk hosted a livestreamed discussion with the party’s leader. “I’m really strongly recommending that people vote for AfD,” he said.
And last weekend, when he joined the party’s campaign launch by video link, he echoed far-right criticism of postwar Germany’s displays of penitence for its Nazi past. “There is too much focus on past guilt,” he said.
A number of European leaders now seem to have decided that enough is enough.
French President Emmanuel Macron has accused Mr. Musk of backing a “reactionary international.” Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez denounced “the richest man on the planet” for “attacking our [EU] institutions, inciting hatred, and openly calling for support for the heirs of Nazism in Germany.” Norway’s prime minister said it was “worrying” that someone with such wealth and influence was intervening in European countries’ domestic politics.
The strongest rebuke has come from Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, after Mr. Musk’s remarks at the AfD launch. “The words we heard … about the need to forget guilt for Nazi crimes sounded all too familiar and ominous,” he said, especially just days before the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi death camp.
While far-right supporters are embracing Mr. Musk’s interventions, Europe’s mainstream leaders will take heart from signs that most Europeans seem firmly opposed to them. A recent poll in Britain and Germany found that more than two-thirds of respondents felt they were unacceptable.
Still, the EU has become concerned that algorithms used by X and other social media sites might skew content in favor of a single political narrative and thus influence election outcomes.
The European Union’s ability to enforce its rules against such behavior may depend less on Mr. Musk than on his patron in the Oval Office.
So far, President Trump has professed to be unaware of Mr. Musk’s Euro-campaigning. He has even said nice things about Keir Starmer, the left-of-center British leader whom Mr. Musk recently called “utterly despicable.”
But via a video link last week with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the U.S. president complained about the hefty fines that the European Union has levied on Google, Apple, Meta, and other tech giants for violating EU antitrust or data-privacy safeguards.
“These are American companies,” he declared. “Whether you like them or not, [the EU] shouldn’t be doing that.”
