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The German government has accused Tesla owner Elon Musk of trying to interfere in the country's election campaign with repeated endorsements of the far-right AfD party.
" It is indeed the case that Elon Musk is trying to influence the federal election ," said government spokeswoman Christiane Hoffmann after Musk's X posts and an opinion piece published over the weekend supporting the anti-Muslim, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland.
She said at a regular press conference that Musk had the right to free speech, adding: " After all, freedom of thought covers even the biggest nonsense ."
Musk has often hit out at German politics, even calling the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, an "idiot" on his social media platform X last month. However, his latest open calls for German voters to support the AfD, which federal authorities classify as a suspected extremist party, have sparked outrage and accusations of disturbing interference in Europe's main economy.
The South African-born entrepreneur, who has been appointed by Donald Trump to co-chair a commission aimed at reducing the size of the US federal government, wrote in X earlier this month: " Only the AfD can save Germany . "
In the post, he shared a video by a German right-wing influencer, Naomi Seibt, who criticized Friedrich Merz, the conservative leader in the German election, and praised Javier Milei, the self-styled "anarcho-capitalist" president of Argentina.
He followed it up at the weekend with a guest editorial in the broadsheet Welt am Sonntag arguing that Germany was teetering on the brink of economic and cultural collapse, defending the AfD against accusations of radicalism and praising the party's approach to the economy, including regulation and taxes.
The centre-right newspaper's opinion section editor, Eva Marie Kogel, posted on X that she had tendered her resignation in protest at the decision to run the article.
Politicians from across the political spectrum criticized Musk's efforts to put his thumb on the scales of German democracy, with Health Minister Karl Lauterbach of Scholz's Social Democratic Party (SPD) calling his intervention " disgraceful and too problematic " and Merz saying it was "intrusive and bigoted".
Merz told the Funke media group: " I cannot recall in the history of Western democracies a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country ."
Scholz's centre-left coalition collapsed last month, prompting him to call a confidence vote to trigger a general election in February, seven months ahead of schedule. His SPD is widely expected to lose to Merz's CDU/CSU bloc amid voter anger over the cost of living and weak economic growth.
Last week, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier explicitly criticized X and Musk indirectly in a short speech announcing his official decision to dissolve parliament and call elections on February 23. / TheGuardian
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