AfD leaders were pleased by Musk’s endorsement.
“Yes! You are perfectly right!” Alice Weidel, the AfD’s chancellor candidate, posted on X shortly after Musk’s missive. Weidel then plugged a recent interview she gave on, as she put it, how “socialist [Angela] Merkel ruined our country” and how “the Soviet European Union” was destroying Germany.
The AfD is polling in second place ahead of Germany’s early election, set for Feb. 23, potentially setting it up to become the largest opposition party in the next parliament.
Musk, who is closely allied to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, has longed expressed sympathy for the AfD — but, also, some uncertainty about the party’s stances.
“Why is there such a negative reaction from some about AfD?” the tech billionaire wrote on X in June. “They keep saying ‘far right,’ but the policies of AfD that I’ve read about don’t sound extremist. Maybe I’m missing something.”
The AfD is surging despite its growing radicalism and persistent warnings from mainstream leaders that it is an extremist, even Nazi, party. Growing support for the far right comes despite state-level domestic intelligence authorities classifying some local branches of the party as extremist organizations aiming to undermine German democracy.
