After Tesla CEO Elon Musk praised the AfD in an article published by a German daily, the leading candidate for chancellor, Friedrich Merz, hit back, decrying Musk’s interference as “intrusive and pretentious.”
A senior German politician dismissed Elon Musk’s public support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) as unprecedented interference, labeling it “intrusive and pretentious.”
Friedrich Merz, the center-right candidate for chancellor in Germany’s February 23 legislative election, lashed out at the Tesla CEO on Sunday, a day after Musk used an op-ed to describe the populist party as the “last spark of hope for this country.”
In the article published in German, Musk also praised the AfD’s approach to regulation, taxes and market deregulation.
The remarks have been fiercely criticized and a senior editor at Welt am Sonntag, the newspaper that published Musk’s commentary, resigned in protest.
The AFD is currently polling second behind Merz’ conservative alliance — the same group that Angela Merkel led until 2021.
What did Merz say?
“I cannot recall, in the history of Western democracies, that there has been a comparable case of interference in the electoral campaign of a friendly country,” Merz, the head of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, told the Funke media group.
Merz said: “Imagine for a brief moment, the — justified — reaction of Americans to a comparable article by a prominent German businessman in the New York Times backing an outsider in the US presidential election campaign.”
He added that Tesla’s first gigafactory in Europe — built east of Berlin — would not have been approved if the far-right party was in power, “because it was the AfD that put up the most fierce resistance to this plant.”
Musk has insisted he has a legitimate interest in German politics because of the investments the electric carmaker has made.
German democracy ‘cannot be bought’
Saskia Esken, co-leader of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), also called out interference in the German election by the world’s richest man.
“In Elon Musk’s world, democracy and workers’ rights are obstacles to more profit,” Esken told the Reuters news agency. “We say quite clearly: Our democracy is defensible and it cannot be bought.”
Another SPD lawmaker, Matthias Miersch, told the Handelsblatt business daily that it was “shameful and dangerous” that the Springer publishing house — which owns Welt am Sonntag — gave Musk “an official platform to promote the AfD.”
German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach on Saturday wrote on X: “The fact that political power is now increasingly easy to buy will cause great damage to democracy. If newspapers join in, they are digging their own graves.”
