Elon Musk’s bid to propel Germany’s far-right party to victory has failed

Elon Musk may be able to control—to some extent—the American government. But on Sunday, German voters showed he does not control theirs.

After polls closed Sunday in snap elections sparked by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s vote of no-confidence in December, early exit polls showed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party—which Musk has been boosting for months—finishing in second place, with about 20 percent of the vote. In first place is the center-right Christian Democratic Union, former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s old party, which garnered about 29 percent of the vote—a victory that means party leader Friedrich Merz will become Chancellor.

The racist, far-right, pro-Russia AfD—founded in 2013 as an anti-European Union party—is an outlier even among Europe’s nationalist parties. One senior leader has been twice convicted of using banned Nazi slogans; the party has also been under observation by the German domestic intelligence agency for suspected extremism.

Like Trump, the AfD supports mass deportations of immigrants and “unassimilated citizens,” which they term “remigration,” as my colleague Isabela Dias explained last year. As Mother Jones contributor Josh Axelrod, a Berlin-based reporter, wrote for us in December:

The AfD’s central pledge is to counteract the so-called Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that claims white Europeans or Americans are the victims of a plot by nonwhite immigrants to “replace” them and poison their societies. It was the inspiration for shooters to take up arms and target Muslim victims in Christchurch, Jews in Pittsburgh, Black people in Buffalo, and gay people in Bratislava.

“It’s the thing that brings together the far-right in multiple countries,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Mother Jones. 

For months, Musk has been warning that anything less than an AfD victory would bring about the destruction of Germany. “Only the AfD can save Germany,” he has repeatedly said. His efforts to boost the party have also included, as I have written, penning an op-ed in one of Germany’s biggest newspapers, Die Welt, about why he supports the party; interviewing party leader Alice Weidel on X last month; and making a video appearance at one of their rallies, at which he claimed Germans need to “move on” from “past guilt”—a comment many interpreted as referring to the Holocaust and subsequently condemned.

Musk continued his pro-AfD push this weekend in the lead-up to the election. When he wasn’t throwing the federal workforce into further disarray or asking elected officials—over whom he has no authority—what they got done this week, Musk spent much of the last couple of days boosting the AfD on X.

Despite coming in second, the results are still an unprecedented success for AfD, whose popularity has grown over the years at the same time as they have succeeded in pushing other German politicians further right. (As Axelrod explained for Mother Jones, the AfD has collaborated with the Christian Democrats in local government.) Weidel, the AfD party leader, is characterizing Sunday’s historic showing as a “success,” and said that they are prepared to be part of Germany’s next government—even though Merz has ruled out forming a governing coalition involving the AfD.

When Musk made his video appearance at the AfD rally last month, he lamented “too much control from [the] global elite” in German affairs. Through their elections, the German people have spoken—and it seems that, like many Americans, they don’t actually want the world’s richest man involved in their government.