Elon Musk wants the far right AfD to win the German election - here’s how he became their champion

Germany’s leading political figures say Musk will face consequences for his endorsement of the country’s far-right party, Tom Watling and Alicja Hagopian write. When a young German anti-climate activist nicknamed the “anti-Greta Thunberg” began flattering tech billionaire Elon Musk on X, few could have foreseen it leading to the tech billionaire wholeheartedly endorsing Germany’s far-right. It would take just ten months.

Germany goes to the polls on Sunday and there are fears the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), a political party partly designated as far-right extremists, could win nearly a quarter of the national vote. X owner turned Trump ally Musk has described the AfD as the only party that “can save Germany”, interviewed the party’s leader, Alice Wiedel, spoken at the AfD’s election rally and written an op-ed endorsing the party.

Much of his interactions have come via English-speaking channels, many with little to do with Germany, and he has been “laser-focused” on migration, despite migration figures having decreased in the country last year. His posts have often shown little concern for reality.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz has described Musk as a “troll”. The expected future chancellor, Freirich Merz, has vowed if he wins office to retaliate against the tech multibillionaire. Dirk Wiese, a politician in the centre-left SPD wing of the government, told The Independent that Musk has “used his influence for deliberate provocations, misinformation, and the spread of populist narratives”.

Other officials, including defence minister Boris Pistorius, have accused Musk and US vice president JD Vance, who recently urged Berlin to end its policy of not working with the far-right, of “calling into question German democracy”. It is a policy, known as “Brandmaeur”, which was put in place in the wake of World War II and the death of the democratically-elected Adolf Hitler, to prevent the second coming of fascism.

The seriousness of the concern in Germany about the rise of the far-right group notwithstanding, Musk has freely admitted that before his first interaction with the “anti-Greta Thunberg” Naomi Seibt on April 20 last year, he “didn’t know [the] AfD from a hole in the ground”.

Since she was 19, Seibt has spent five years becoming a right-wing firebrand, slowly building up an audience largely outside of Germany. She began with opposition to climate activism, working with a pro-Trump, climate denial US think tank called Heartland Institute, but quickly turned to fighting against the “woke mind virus”. She is anti-feminist, anti-Islam, pro-Russian and dismissive of German guilt over its Nazi past.

She was also fiercely opposed to the ban of X in Brazil, believing it to be a war on free speech and against the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsanaro, the country’s version of Donald Trump who has since been indicted for a plot to reclaim power after losing - but refusing to admit defeat in - the 2023 election.

On 20 April, she tweeted a meme describing Musk as “refusing to negotiate with tyrants”, a nod to his battle in Brazil and his refusal to censor X in Germany. Musk responded within seven minutes. “Doing our best,” he wrote. Musk had spoken about Germany once before, in September 2023. After describing a video of a German NGO transporting small-boat migrants to Italy as having “invasion vibes”, he dismissed suggestions this was his endorsement of the anti-migrant AfD, saying he knew nothing of the group.

But after that first interaction with Seibt, the German influencer claims Musk started researching the AfD. The pair would soon strike up a friendship after Musk, in June, asked her publicly: “Why is there such a negative reaction from some about AfD? They keep saying ‘far right’, but the policies of AfD that I’ve read about don’t sound extremist. Maybe I’m missing something.” Ms Seibt had just endorsed the AfD on X.

From mid-July to now, Musk has since directly interacted with Ms Seibt at least 47 times and retweeted her content on many other occasions. Seibt has tweeted about the AfD some 364 times since January 2024, analysis by the Independent has found; increasing rapidly in the past few months.

Thanks largely to amplification from Musk, these tweets have been viewed over 146.5 million times, our analysis shows. In the past month alone, Seibt’s mentioned the AfD in at least 132 posts. This amounts to an average of four posts a day, not including her wider political content spanning from anti-migration to warnings of the “woke mind virus”.

Seibt’s following has grown by 442 per cent since her first public exchange with Musk, from around 74,000 in early April 2024 to 401,697 on 19 February. In May, weeks after her first interaction with Musk, she noted on the Russia social media site Telegram how much easier it was “to get so much attention” writing in English on X.

A few days earlier, Musk had shared a video of a protest in Hamburg by a pro-Iran group called “Muslim Interactive”. More than 1,000 demonstrators were seen holding up posters with slogans like “caliphate is the solution” and calling for the introduction of Sharia law.