Olaf Scholz: German election ‘will not be decided by social media owners’
Share:
Chancellor’s New Year’s Eve address follows Elon Musk’s endorsement of German far-right party AfD on X. The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has urged voters not to let the “owners of social media channels” decide next year’s snap election, after Elon Musk repeatedly endorsed the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
In a New Year’s Eve address recorded for television and made available before its broadcast on Tuesday, Scholz said German citizens alone had the power to decide “where Germany goes from here” after the general election on 23 February. “It will not be decided by the owners of social media channels,” Scholz said of the country’s future.
“In our debates, one can be forgiven for sometimes thinking the more extreme an opinion is, the more attention it will garner.” Rather, Scholz said, the fate of German society “will be up to the vast majority of reasonable and decent people”. Without mentioning Musk or his platform, X, explicitly, Scholz urged Germans to resist manipulation and to stand up for their democracy.
“After all, it’s customary to make wishes on New Year’s Eve. What I wish for is that we will not let ourselves be played off each other,” he said. Scholz noted there had been a surge of disinformation on social media after the Christmas market attack in Magdeburg on 20 December in which five people were killed and more than 200 injured. The car ramming was allegedly committed by a Saudi-born assailant with far-right sympathies.
