Musk Rattles Politics In Europe With Posts

Musk has weighed in with incendiary posts on European politics, including supporting a far-right party ahead of an election in Germany, accusing the U.K.'s prime minister of being complicit in rape, denouncing judges in Italy and slamming the European Commission.

The posts from the world's richest man has morphed into a diplomatic headache, and caught several mainstream European political parties on the back foot. Weeks ahead of Donald Trump's inauguration, many European leaders have been wary of publicly calling out Musk, worried it would damage relations with Trump and prod the tech entrepreneur to double down on his attacks.

But the repeated posts to his 210 million followers are setting the news agenda in several of those countries, making it impossible to ignore. Europe's unpopular leaders worry that Musk could use X to mobilize disenchanted voters as weak economic growth erodes trust in mainstream politics and stoked political instability.

"Ten years ago if someone had told us the owner of one of the world's biggest social-media companies would support a new international reactionary movement and intervene directly in elections...who would have imagined that?" President Emmanuel Macron of France told ambassadors Monday.

Musk's bare-knuckle approach to foreign affairs highlights the challenge that U.S. allies face in navigating the next Trump presidency. The last time Trump was in the White House, foreign governments had to deal with his unpredictable late-night social media statements. Now they also have to digest Musk's.

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer spent a large part of a news conference Monday that was supposed to focus on the country's overstretched health system rebutting Musk's posts about the prime minister's record in jailing child rapists during a previous stint as the U.K.'s chief prosecutor over a decade ago. Starmer said he was "not going to individualise this to Elon Musk or anyone else" but also spent several minutes defending his record and denouncing those "that are spreading lies and misinformation." Ahead of Starmer's news conference, Musk had pinned a message to the top of his X feed: "America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government." Starmer declined to comment.

European politicians and business people opine on U.S. politics all the time-often to criticize Trump-but few have any influence on U.S. voters.

Political strategists here, however, fear Musk could tilt the playing field by wielding his X platform as a powerful tool to campaign for parties he backs.

In Germany, some strategists and politicians worry Musk's personal views could influence a February general election.

Musk last year called Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany a "fool," and has backed Germany's far-right AfD party. He is hosting a live chat on X this week with AfD co-chair Alice Weidel, and wrote an op-ed in a prominent German newspaper calling her party "the last spark of hope for this country." The AfD is further to the right than most other comparable anti-establishment, anti-immigration parties in Europe.

Germany's domestic-intelligence agency has classified some of the AfD's regional chapters as extremist organizations. The party's draft electoral platform says sanctions against Russia should be lifted, Germany's foreign and energy policy freed of U.S. influences, and Germany should leave the EU.

Musk's endorsement "is a welcome counterpoint to the negative campaign against us that's happening everyday in Germany" and could be a "game-changer," said Leif-Erik Holm, a senior AfD lawmaker.

Friedrich Merz, chairman of the center-right CDU and, according to polls, the most likely winner of the February vote, told German media that Musk's intervention is "intrusive and presumptuous," adding that "I cannot remember a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country in the history of Western democracies." Trump's former strategist Steve Bannon tried to build a network of right-wing parties ahead of elections for the EU parliament in 2019, with limited effect. Musk, by focusing on domestic European elections and armed with a social-media company, could be more successful, says José Ignacio Torreblanca, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank. "He sees himself as a savior of U.S. democracy from the progressives," Torreblanca said. "He thinks this should...continue in Europe." Still, there are hurdles. In Britain, for instance, only 26% of people have a positive view of Musk, the same level as Starmer, according to pollster YouGov, and average daily users of X has dropped from 10.3 million a day in May 2022 to 8.6 million in May 2024, says the regulator Ofcom. X's own figures show the average number of active users across the EU was down about 5 million between October 2023 and summer of 2024.

The EU commission, the bloc's executive branch, said Monday that it might expand a probe into X to include the livestream Musk is hosting with Germany's AfD. "You're free to express your views, but there are certain limits to that," commission spokesman Thomas Regnier said. Musk has said he would challenge any EU findings against X in court.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy is one of the few Western European leaders whom Musk admires. They have met several times since she won power in 2022. The right-wing leader is more attuned than most of her European peers with his opinions on immigration, falling birthrates and "wokeism." Meloni, told newspaper Corriere della Sera in an article published Friday, that while she sometimes disagrees with Musk, "it makes me laugh how people who until yesterday hailed Musk as a genius now depict him as a monster, just because he chose what is considered the 'wrong' side of the barricades."