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How Elon Musk has meddled in European affairs

From bashing Keir Starmer to promoting the AfD, the X owner is not shy about intervening

Last week Elon Musk hosted a livestream on the platform with Alice Weidel in which he heaped praise on the anti-immigrant, pro-Kremlin AfD co-leader. Photograph: Andre M Chang/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

Last week Elon Musk hosted a livestream on the platform with Alice Weidel in which he heaped praise on the anti-immigrant, pro-Kremlin AfD co-leader. Photograph: Andre M Chang/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

A limited – at best – understanding of the continent of Europe and its component countries has not prevented the world’s richest man from intervening in the domestic politics of several of them, as well as attacking the EU itself.

Here we take a brief look at some of the occasions on which X owner Elon Musk has used his position as proprietor of one of the world’s largest social media platforms to meddle in the internal affairs of sovereign democratic states outside the US.

UK

An apparently flourishing relationship with Keir Starmer’s star-struck predecessor Rishi Sunak rapidly descended into something else altogether after the Labour leader became prime minister, triggered by the UK’s far-right summer riots.

Musk has variously claimed Britain was a “tyrannical police state”, called Starmer “two-tier Keir” over allegations of judicial discrimination against rightwingers, and described new farm inheritance tax rules as the UK “going full Stalin”.

He has asked King Charles to dissolve parliament and claimed Starmer should be in jail for his alleged part in the grooming gangs scandal, calling the prime minister “utterly despicable” and “deeply complicit in mass rapes in exchange for votes”.

Musk’s increasingly erratic remarks have also taken aim at the safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, and even the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, who he said “doesn’t have what it takes” – apparently because of his refusal to laud far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

Germany

Weeks before a general election, Musk drew fury with a remark on X about the far-right Alternative für Deutschland claiming “only the AfD can save Germany”, then an op-ed for Welt am Sonntag saying it was “clearly false” to call the party extreme.

He has also called the country’s Social Democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz, “a fool” and its president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, an “anti-democratic tyrant”. Scholz has responded with the words: “The rule is: don’t feed the troll.”

Last week the X owner hosted a livestream on the platform with Alice Weidelin which he heaped praise on the anti-immigrant, pro-Kremlin AfD co-leader, repeated his claim the party was Germany’s only hope, while Weidel said that Adolf Hitler was a communist.

The EU

The bloc’s digital rulebook represents a threat to Musk’s business interests and the billionaire has frequently attacked Brussels and the European Commission, which has already ruled that X violates its Digital Services Act(DSA) and will look closely at the Weidel livestream.

After the outgoing commission vice-president, Věra Jourová, told digital newspaper Politico Musk was “not able to recognise good and evil”, he described her as “the epitome of banal, bureaucratic evil”. He has similarly sparred with former commissioner Thierry Breton. When Breton, a key architect of the DSA, criticised Musk’s support for AfD as “the very definition of foreign interference”, Musk responded: “Bro, American ‘foreign interference’ is the only reason you’re not speaking German or Russian right now”.

In November Musk also called the incoming commission “undemocratic”, adding that the European parliament – which votes on commissioners and co-decides on EU law – “should vote directly on matters, not give up authority to the EU commission”.

Elsewhere 

Musk has backed Donald Trump’s plans for Greenland and asked, after Romania’s top court cancelled the presidential election on evidence of foreign interference: “How can a judge cancel an election and not be considered a dictator?”

He has also intervened in Ireland, claiming in a post prompted by an anti-immigration rally in Dublin that “the people of Ireland are standing up for themselves” and promising to use X to fund legal challenges to planned hate speech legislation.

Author: Jon Henley, Europe correspondent

Source: The Guardian

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