# Elon Musk — "The last spark of hope" > [!quote] The AfD is "the last spark of hope for this country." > — Elon Musk, guest op-ed in *Welt am Sonntag*, December 28, 2024 (published in German; English as reported) On [[Alice Weidel]]: "Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!" He presented the party as "political realism" rather than extremism. ## Context Musk's guest essay ran in the Axel Springer Sunday paper *Welt am Sonntag* eight weeks before the federal election. Opinion editor Eva Marie Kogel resigned in protest, other staff objected publicly, and incoming editor-in-chief Jan Philipp Burgard published a rebuttal. At the time Germany's domestic intelligence service ([[BfV]]) was monitoring the [[AfD]] as a suspected extremist organization. ## Why this matters This took Musk's support for the AfD from posts on his own platform into Germany's mainstream press, and turned the question of whether to print it into a crisis for the newspaper. The Weidel defense attacks a claim no serious critic was making (that Weidel is Hitler) in order to dismiss the one the BfV was investigating (extremism within the party). See [[Musk AfD Campaign]]. ## Verification - **Reporting:** Euronews, Mediaite, Newsweek (December 28–29, 2024). - **Status:** Translation. The op-ed was published in German, and English renderings of its key phrases are consistent across outlets. ## Related quotes - [[Elon Musk - too much focus on past guilt]] — the January 2025 Halle speech