Elon Musk recommends voting for the AfD in a guest article. This apparently causes a rethink in the FDP – and contradictions with the boss’s previous line.
“Dare a little more Milei or Musk”: Christian Lindner presented this recipe in Germany at the beginning of December. When Elon Musk expressed his sympathy for the AfD in a short post on The FDP leader invited Musk to speak – unsuccessfully.
The FDP now seems to have drawn this too, if you believe the words of its Secretary General. Marco Buschmann told “Bild” on Sunday shortly after Musk’s article was published: “Anyone who flirts with a partly ethnic, xenophobic and anti-Semitic party is not suitable as a political role model.” There isn’t much left of his party leader’s appeal to dare to do more with Musk.
Interestingly, Buschmann rhetorically follows someone with whom the FDP recently had a falling out: Transport Minister and ex-FDP member Volker Wissing. He had already told the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” on Saturday: “Anyone who openly and directly supports right-wing populist politicians and parties – be it financially or verbally – can never be a role model for liberal politics.”
Other politicians who had previously praised Musk also criticized the billionaire after his guest article. “If the AfD had its way, there would be no more investments from Elon Musk in Germany at all. Maybe he should remember that,” writes CDU politician Jens Spahn on Musk’s Network X.
There is also strong opposition to Musk’s text from the editorial team itself. Franziska Zimmerer, head of the Community and Social department at “Welt”, published a comment on Sunday afternoon entitled “Why I wouldn’t have printed this post”. In it she writes, among other things: “This text should not have appeared. (…) It is an under-complex election call for the AfD, which does not require any argument and whose author did not even find it necessary to spend three minutes to deal with this party.”
The publication of the article shows a fundamental problem with independent journalism. Musk doesn’t need the “world,” Zimmerer writes in her employer’s register, but he uses it to present journalists as “the legacy media that jumps when the richest man in the world wants it.”