Leaders of Germany's leading parties have criticized Elon Musk for an article in Welt am Sonntag supporting the Alternative for Germany. The party itself has already made campaign posters using the billionaire's quotes.
Representatives of Germany's largest parties criticized on Sunday, December 29, a column by American billionaire Elon Musk, published the day before in the newspaper Welt am Sonntag, in which he supported the right-wing populist party “Alternative for Germany” (AdN).< /p>
Criticism from the main parties
SPD co-chair Saskia Esken told Reuters that “our democracy is strong and cannot be bought.” “Anyone who tries to influence our elections from the outside, anyone who supports such an anti-democratic and anti-humane party as AdN, regardless of whether this influence is organized by the state of Russia or through the concentrated financial and media power of Ilona Musk and his billionaire friends on the board of directors of the Springer publishing house, must count on our stiff resistance,” she added. she.
“Elon Musk's pre-election speech is aggressive and self-confident,” the head of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), leader of the CDU/CSU faction in the Bundestag and candidate for the chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, told the Funke media group. ). “I cannot recall a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country in the history of Western democracies,” continued Mertz. of the American presidential election campaign”.
“Our democracy is harmed when Mr. Musk, the Chinese state or the Moscow troll factories sharpen our democratic discourse. That is why the right-wing extremists from AdN like it so much. Our task as democratic forces is to stop it,” he wrote in social network X, the head of the campaign headquarters of the party “Soyuz-90/Greens” Andreas Audrech Audretsch).
Other votes for and against Musk's article
“Election advertising by a right-wing extremist party, presented as journalism. Flattering distancing, which is not journalism at all. Ignoring internal editorial criticism. All of this is unbelievable,” Reuters quotes the head of the German Journalists' Association, Mika Beuster, as saying.
A more restrained assessment was given by economist Veronika Grimm, a member of the German government's “council of wise men.” She called the discussion that has unfolded “really good, because it is very important that we all get involved in politics now.” “There is no point in suppressing discussions about the AfD and its themes. It needs to be conducted. And that can also be managed,” Grimm said.
The AfD itself, as expected, has responded positively to Musk's column and has already made campaign posters with quotes from the article. The billionaire posted one of them in his X, mistakenly calling the German newspaper Weld, not Welt.
What Musk wrote about in his article for Die Welt
In his column for Die Welt, Musk writes that the German economy is “stuck in bureaucracy and stifling regulations.” He criticizes the migration and energy policies of the German government and considers the promises of the AfD to be the answer to all of the problems listed. “Germany is at a critical juncture – its future is teetering on the brink of economic and cultural collapse,” the billionaire is convinced.
On the Die Welt website, Musk's column was published along with a comment from the newspaper's editor-in-chief, Jan Philipp Burgard. “This is a text that calls for denial,” the introduction read. “Musk's diagnosis is correct, but his therapeutic approach, that only the AfD can save Germany, is fatally wrong,” the editor-in-chief commented.
The publication's website also featured a column by Franziska Zimmerer, head of the Public and Social Affairs department. She spoke about Musk's article and that “many colleagues, including myself, opposed the publication.” Die Welt's opinion editor Eva Marie Kogel has announced her resignation in protest.
Der Spiegel reported that the publication of Musk's column was “rigged” by Mathias Döpfner, the head of Axel Springer.