It did not take long for Eva Marie Kogel, the opinion editor at Die Welt, Germany’s paper of record, to decide what the right thing for her to do was. Die Welt ran an editorial from Elon Musk praising Germany’s extremist far-right political party AfD and calling it the country’s future. Kogel announced her resignation.
Musk’s piece in Die Welt came on the heels of a December 20 tweet where he posted, "Only the AfD can save Germany."
AfD translates to “Alternative for Germany.” The party was started by “Euroskeptics,” opposed to the single European currency, in 2013, but has taken a hard right turn since then. It has been classified as a home for right-wing extremism but is gaining ground in parts of the country. Unlike our two-party system in the U.S., Germany has at least eight serious political parties. As the country heads toward parliamentary elections in February of 2025, AfD is polling in second place, which translates into about a 1/5 share of the vote. Musk, in Trumpian style, dismissed the view that AfD is a right-wing extremist organization as “clearly false.” But German courts, in May of this year, backed the German security service’s decision to investigate the party as an extremist group. Part of the concern centered on the activities of AfD’s leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, Bjoern Hoecke. In 2017, he condemned Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame,” and called for a rejection of the negative light the country views its Nazi past in, saying it should make a “180-degree turn” in how that era is assessed. In elections in September of 2024, AfD became the majority party in Thuringia, the first far-right party to succeed in an election in Germany since 1945. The party “has embraced anti-immigration, Islamophobic, and xenophobic positions, as well as anti-LGBTQ+, anti-environmental, and pro-Russian positions, among others,” according to the American-German Institute. Musk has grotesquely misrepresented the position of the AfD. And while his foray into German politics might seem peripheral to the concerns we face in this country, it is not. His willingness to lie about the views of an extremist political party is disturbing given the role he is about to assume in this country, parallel to but outside the boundaries of accountability for people who work in our government. If he will do it there, deliberately misleading people about what a party’s rise to power would mean for a country, there is no reason to believe he will be honest in his dealings here. It’s important for people who may not already understand that to be exposed to the facts about what’s going on here. No matter what Musk claims, the AfD is most definitely not Obama’s Democratic Party. That’s what he tweeted when Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy pointed out that Musk’s support of AfD was support of a party that had aligned itself with Nazi ideology. Musk tweeted that AfD policies were “identical to those of the US Democratic Party when Obama took office!” Just to make sure everyone understood what he was saying, Musk continued, “I don’t think there is a single difference.” In fact, of course, there are all kinds of differences, and the overlap between AfD and the Democratic Party’s platform when Obama took office is a virtual null set. But that obvious reality didn’t keep Musk from misrepresenting while calling Murphy a liar. It would feel tremendously high school if it wasn’t so serious.
In Die Welt, Musk wrote, “The AfD is committed to a controlled immigration policy that prioritises integration and the preservation of German culture and security.” It’s an all too familiar refrain for Germans. “A nation must preserve its core values and cultural heritage in order to remain strong and united.” Musk left his native South Africa at age 17 for a brief stay in Canada before entering the U.S. He became an American citizen in 2002 after spending a decade working in the country. He has business interests in Germany, which may explain his interest in who wins the next election there. He said those investments gave him the right to give voice to his opinion. Much of the impetus for AfD’s advance and for Musk’s support of it seems to center around Germany’s immigration policy. To understand the dynamic, you need to know that Germany has absorbed large numbers of refugees and other immigrants, and that the impact on the country has been predictably tremendous. In 1980, when I was in school in Germany, there was an acceptance of the need for “gastarbeiters,” foreign workers who filled gaps in Germany’s labor pool. Humanitarian crises in the last half century have fueled migration, and Germany has been at the forefront of helping people, as when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel announced an open door policy in 2015. AfD, and now Musk, are speaking to less tolerant Germans, using anti-immigrant animus in hopes of provoking a sharp right political turn. In March of this year, the AP reported, “The EU received 1.1 million asylum requests in 2023, the highest number since 2015. Germany got by far the largest number of claims — more than 300,000 — mostly from Syria, Afghanistan and Turkey. The country has also taken in more than a million Ukrainian refugees displaced by Russia’s invasion.” “This is not about xenophobia, but about ensuring that Germany does not lose its identity in the pursuit of globalisation,” Musk wrote. In his efforts to defend AfD against claims it is Nazi-like, Musk singled out party leader Alice Weidel, who has a same-sex partner originally from Sri Lanka. “Does that sound like Hitler to you?” Musk admonished people who would “condemn the AfD as extremist” against being “fooled by the label attached to it.” Musk’s willingness to dismiss the similarities and to advocate for AfD to take over Germany is deeply disturbing. The suggestion that having a gay leader somehow means the party can’t hold the extremist views it explicitly advocates for is simply wrong. And it is disingenuous. Musk fails the lesson of history: while the Nazis persecuted homosexuals, sending about 15,000 gay men to concentration camps, it was an open secret that Hitler’s right-hand man, the hyper-masculine Ernst Röhm, who headed the Brownshirts, was homosexual. One gay leader doesn’t mean anything here. Die Welt’s incoming editor-in-chief, Jan Philipp Burgard, offered an opposing view that ran alongside Musk’s column. Burgard wrote that while Musk might be correct about the problems Germany faces, the argument that only AfD can fix things is “fatally wrong.” He pointed out that AfD supports rapprochement with Russia, including trade restoration and an end to sanctions, and that the party supports appeasing China and leaving the European Union. Burgard wrote that leaving the Union would be a “catastrophe.” (Jens Spahn, a member of the center-right CDU party and former health minister, tweeted that about 40% of Germany’s foreign trade is with EU partners and that without that relationship, the country’s economy would collapse.) Burgard also lambasted Hoecke, the leader of AfD in Thuringia, for his repeated use of banned Nazi slogans and salutes. The Association of German Journalists (DJV) protested Musk’s piece, calling it “election advertising” and saying that “the German media must not allow itself to be manipulated into acting as a mouthpiece for autocrats and their friends.”
Last January, support for the AfD appeared to be waning after reports that some of its high-ranking figures were part of a meeting of extremists who gathered to discuss deportation of millions of immigrants, including German citizens. There were mass protests at the time, but some of the outrage seems to have faded despite sustained protests.
Germany’s immigration problems are real, as are ours at home. But the answer isn’t Nazism or right-wing authoritarianism. It is policymaking, like the compromise bill Democrats offered earlier this year, only to have Trump lead Republicans to reject it so he could keep immigration alive as a political issue to run on. Immigration isn’t an immutable problem that can only be addressed with hate and inhumane policies. Musk seems to be doing his best to make right-wing extremism salonfähig—German for “presentable” or “acceptable in good company.” He is doing it in our country, and now in Germany too. It is something we should be deeply concerned about as he assumes unofficial, unelected power alongside Donald Trump. Musk called Germany’s right-wing extremist party the country’s “last spark of hope” today. That dangerous ideology is wrong for the Germans, and it’s wrong for us too. Musk’s column has as much to do with us as it has to do with the Germans. We’re in this together, Joyce You're currently a free subscriber to Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance . For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Saturday, December 28, 2024
Musk in Die Welt
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