“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).
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 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”.
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.
“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.
- Right-arm salute -
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.
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”.
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.
Conservative election frontrunner Friedrich Merz, who boasts a business world background, has vowed to speak to Trump, whom he has characterised as “predictably unpredictable”.
While Berlin's political establishment is in a flap over Trump 2.0, the AfD cannot believe its luck.
Like Musk, she spoke admiringly of Trump and said it had caused her “physical pain to see how he has been disparaged” in Germany.
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.
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”.
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