The Japan Times - Germany's far-right AfD basks in spotlight of Musk support

"Let's go, guys, let's go -- fight for a great future for Germany!" the tech billionaire shouted via video link at a recent campaign rally of the Alternative for Germany (AfD).

"It's good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything," he told the jubilant crowd in Halle in the party's ex-communist eastern heartland.

While mainstream Berlin has reacted with a shudder to the new leadership in Washington, the AfD has cheered its ideological allies in the fight against migrants, wind farms, gender politics and all things "woke".

As Europe's top economy careens towards February 23 polls, Musk has weighed in on the campaign with volleys of online crossfire.

As well as backing the AfD, the man behind SpaceX, Tesla and X has also trolled centre-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz with insults such as "fool" and "Oaf Schitz".

"You must vote for change," Musk told Germans in a streamed conversation with the party's top election candidate Alice Weidel. "And that is why I'm really strongly recommending that people vote for AfD."

On Friday, US Vice President JD Vance backed that stance in a speech to a security meeting in Munich where he berated EU leaders for ignoring the wishes of voters worried about immigration in a broadside later hailed by Trump.

Long shunned as outsiders in Germany, the subject of mass protests and security services surveillance, the AfD has gloated about the attention lavished on it from across the Atlantic as it polls at a record 20 percent.

"It's a good time for the AfD because we are getting a lot of support from the Trump administration," said the party's Berlin boss, architect Kristin Brinker.

"If the richest man in the world and people from Trump's circle say that the AfD is okay, you can work with them, then that's the best thing that could have happened -- and I think it will open even more doors for us."

- Right-arm salute -

The AfD was invited to Trump's inauguration, a day on which a jubilant Musk gave a right-arm salute many interpreted as the Nazi greeting outlawed in post-war Germany.

Musk has denied any such meaning, but many of his critics were not convinced -- including political activists who beamed the image and the word "Heil" onto the Tesla electric-car plant outside Berlin.

When Musk addressed the AfD campaign rally, he told the crowd via video link to be proud of their "millennia-old" culture and worry less about their historical guilt.

It played well with the party, whose senior figures have called for an end to Germany's post-World War II culture of repentance and dubbed Berlin's Holocaust remembrance site a "memorial of shame".

Musk has delighted in deriding Germany's centrist politicians, who have been stunned by the new hostility from the United States, long their most important ally.

Scholz has tried to push back, including on Trump's stated designs on Greenland, seeking to signal a quietly resolute stance while avoiding further stirring up a hornets' nest.

Trump -- who often rails against Germany over insufficient NATO spending and its huge trade surplus -- has also issued threats, such as tariffs that would hammer Germany's already ailing economy.

Conservative election frontrunner Friedrich Merz, who boasts a business world background, has vowed to speak to Trump, whom he has characterised as "predictably unpredictable".

- 'Insane, woke, leftist' -

While Berlin's political establishment is in a flap over Trump 2.0, the AfD cannot believe its luck.

In her streamed X chat with Musk, Weidel claimed the AfD had been "negatively framed" as an extremist group. She insisted it was really a "conservative libertarian" party.

Like Musk, she spoke admiringly of Trump and said it had caused her "physical pain to see how he has been disparaged" in Germany.

Both voiced their shared disdain for German bureaucracy and online "censorship" and agreed heartily when Weidel slammed Germany's "insane, woke, leftist, socialist" education system.

When the conversation turned to Germany's Nazi history, Weidel insisted Hitler was a "communist". They also discussed the Middle East and religion, before their exchanges took an interstellar turn.

Weidel asked Musk about his plans to settle Mars, leading the Space X chief to expound at length on his vision for humans to become "a multi-planet species".

While their chat was widely ridiculed in German media, political scientist Wolfgang Schroeder of Kassel University predicted Musk's praise for the AfD would have "a mobilising effect" and presented "a kind of ennoblement".

T.Maeda--JT