# Musk AfD Campaign For nine weeks before Germany's February 23, 2025 federal election, [[Elon Musk]] campaigned openly for the [[AfD]], a party Germany's domestic intelligence service ([[BfV]]) was then monitoring as a suspected extremist organization. He did it with every tool he had: posts on the platform he owns, a guest op-ed in one of the country's largest newspapers, a live interview with the party's candidate for chancellor on X, and a video address to its campaign launch. Musk was at the same time a senior figure in the incoming American administration. It was an unusually direct intervention by a foreign private citizen in a German national election. German parties and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier condemned it as unacceptable outside interference. The AfD doubled its vote to 20.8% and finished second, its best national result, but stayed out of government. Musk kept going: in September 2026, when the party won the Saxony-Anhalt state election, he congratulated it in German. ## Timeline | Date | Event | |---|---| | Dec 20, 2024 | Musk posts **"Only the AfD can save Germany,"** replying to a video by right-wing influencer Naomi Seibt attacking [[Friedrich Merz]]'s refusal to govern with the AfD. See [[Elon Musk - 2024-12-20 - only the AfD can save Germany]]. | | Dec 20–21, 2024 | After the Magdeburg Christmas-market car attack, Musk posts that Chancellor [[Olaf Scholz]] "should resign immediately" and calls him an "incompetent fool." | | Dec 28, 2024 | Guest op-ed in *Welt am Sonntag* (Axel Springer) calls the AfD "the last spark of hope" for Germany. Defending Weidel, who lives with a same-sex partner of Sri Lankan origin, he writes: "Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!" Opinion editor **Eva Marie Kogel resigns** in protest, and incoming editor-in-chief Jan Philipp Burgard publishes a rebuttal alongside it. See [[Elon Musk - the last spark of hope]]. | | Jan 2025 | German officials accuse Musk of election interference. The European Commission adds the planned Weidel interview to its Digital Services Act probe of X. The transparency group LobbyControl says the interview could amount to an illegal party donation, since German law restricts contributions to parties from non-EU sources to €1,000. | | Jan 9, 2025 | **Live X conversation with [[Alice Weidel]]**, about an hour long. Musk says "only the AfD can save Germany" twice and tells viewers "people need to get behind the AfD, or things are going to get very much worse for Germany." Weidel claims Hitler was a "communist" and "socialist." The head of Munich's Institute for Contemporary History calls this "historically fundamentally false." Peak live audience is about 200,000 against Musk's roughly 212 million followers. | | Jan 20, 2025 | At the Trump inauguration celebration, Musk makes a stiff-armed gesture widely compared to a Nazi salute. See [[Roman Salute Revival]]. | | Jan 25, 2025 | **Video address to the AfD campaign launch in Halle**, about 4,500 people, with Weidel on stage. "There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that." Children "should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents." "I think you're really the best hope for Germany." Weidel closes with "make Germany great again." Large counter-demonstrations follow, reportedly about 100,000 at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate. See [[Elon Musk - too much focus on past guilt]]. | | Jan 27, 2025 | 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, two days after Halle. Scholz and European leaders publicly reject Musk's remarks. | | Feb 14, 2025 | [[JD Vance]] attacks European "firewalls" at Munich and meets Weidel the same day. See [[Vance Munich Security Conference Speech]]. | | Feb 23, 2025 | **Federal election.** CDU/CSU 28.5% (208 seats); AfD **20.8% (152 seats)**, second place and its best national result. The other parties keep the firewall, and Merz becomes chancellor on May 6, 2025. See [[2025 German Federal Election]]. | | Sept 6, 2026 | The AfD wins 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt, its first state-level win within reach of forming a government. Musk posts **"Gut gemacht!"** ("Well done!"). An AfD figure replies inviting "strong and constructive cooperation." See [[2026 Saxony-Anhalt State Election]]. | ## The three messages **1. "Only the AfD."** Musk's first move was not a general complaint about German politics. He named the one party the others had agreed never to govern with and declared it the only option. That is a direct attack on the *Brandmauer*, the firewall between mainstream parties and the AfD, and it is the same position Vance took publicly at Munich seven weeks later. **2. Normalization by vouching.** The op-ed and the X conversation did the same work: an internationally famous businessman presenting the party as ordinary. "Does that sound like Hitler to you?" answers a charge no mainstream critic was making, that Weidel personally is Hitler, in order to dismiss the charge the BfV was actually investigating, which is extremism within the party. Weidel's claim, made on Musk's platform, that Hitler was a leftist is the same move from the other side. **3. Memory as the obstacle.** Halle was the most consequential message. Germany's postwar settlement treats confronting the Nazi past as a civic duty, the core of the political culture the AfD's own radical wing attacks. Musk told an AfD rally there was "too much focus on past guilt," five days after the inauguration gesture and two days before the Auschwitz anniversary. It restated, in an American billionaire's voice, a line AfD figures such as Björn Höcke had been attacking for years. ## Why it matters - **Platform ownership as a campaign asset.** Musk did not buy ads. He owned the venue. The X conversation, the posts and the amplification all happened on infrastructure he controls, which is why the EU's response ran through platform regulation (the Digital Services Act) rather than election law. Compare the American version, [[America PAC]], where he paid for the ground game instead. - **The transatlantic handoff.** Musk (December–January) and Vance (February) delivered the same message about the firewall within weeks of each other, from inside and just outside the new administration. This is the strongest single case in the vault for the [[International Far-Right Networks]] thesis that the American and European right now coordinate, not merely resemble each other. - **It didn't win in 2025 and kept building after.** The AfD doubled its vote but not its power in 2025. In 2026 it reached 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt, and Musk was still there to congratulate it. The campaign should be read as a long investment, not a one-election intervention. ## See Also - [[AfD]] · [[Alice Weidel]] · [[Elon Musk]] · [[BfV]] - [[Musk UK Campaign]] — the British counterpart, built around a person ([[Tommy Robinson]]) rather than a party - [[Elon Musk - 2024-12-20 - only the AfD can save Germany]] · [[Elon Musk - the last spark of hope]] · [[Elon Musk - too much focus on past guilt]] - [[2025 German Federal Election]] · [[2026 Saxony-Anhalt State Election]] · [[Vance Munich Security Conference Speech]] - [[Roman Salute Revival]] · [[International Far-Right Networks]] · [[German History Hub]] - [[Holocaust]] · [[Great Replacement Theory]] · [[Elon Musk - 2023-11-15 - great replacement endorsement]]