Olaf Scholz hits back after Elon Musk calls president ‘tyrant’

The German chancellor used his New Year’s Eve address to rebuke Elon Musk for criticising the country’s president and boosting the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party before elections in February.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, SpaceX and Tesla boss Elon Musk, and German chancellor Olaf Scholz. Picture: Supplied

Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, has used his New Year’s Eve address to the nation to rebuke Elon Musk for describing the country’s president as an “anti-democratic tyrant”.

Mr Musk, the world’s richest person and an enthusiastic supporter of anti-Establishment parties across the West, has spent much of the past two weeks trying to bolster the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party before elections in February. He has praised the AfD as the “last spark of hope” in an opinion piece in a conservative German newspaper, and spread baseless claims that the Saudi Arabian suspect in an attack at a Christmas market in Magdeburg was an Islamist.

In a speech marking the formal dissolution of the Bundestag on Friday, President Steinmeier warned voters to be on their guard against “foreign influence”, singling out Mr Musk’s social network X as a platform where external meddling was “especially intense”.

Mr Musk responded by tweeting: “Steinmeier is an anti-democratic tyrant! Shame on him.” He then alleged that Der Spiegel, one of the country’s leading news magazines, had fallen under the “corrupting” financial influence of the Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and said he would interview Alice Weidel, the AfD leader who is vying to be the next chancellor, on X.

Why is there such a negative reaction from some about AfD?

They keep saying “far right”, but the policies of AfD that I’ve read about don’t sound extremist. Maybe I’m missing something.

— Kekius Maximus (@elonmusk) June 9, 2024

The maverick tycoon’s interventions have delighted the AfD and appalled politicians across the German centre and left.

Leaders of the four largest mainstream parties condemned Mr Musk’s remarks, which one of the figureheads of Mr Scholz’s Social Democratic Party likened to President Putin’s attempts to subvert democratic processes in Europe.

Yesterday (Tuesday) Mr Scholz indirectly reproached Mr Musk in his traditional New Year’s Eve speech.

“It is you, the citizens, who will determine how things will play out in Germany in the future,” he said. “This will not be decided by the owners of social media.”

🚨BREAKING: Elon Musk will hold an X space with AfD leader Alice Weidel before the German Election in February.

The MSM will HATE this. 🇩🇪 pic.twitter.com/98clowbgLe

— Inevitable West (@Inevitablewest) December 30, 2024

The AfD’s opponents are worried that Musk’s aura of success will lend the populist party a sheen of credibility and allow it to portray itself to the electorate as part of a global uprising against liberal centrism, led by Donald Trump.

While the AfD’s ideological program has considerable overlaps with Mr Trump’s and those of various other insurgent right-wing parties, it is treated as an extremist pariah by its peers on the European right because of its historical revisionism and occasional forays into explicitly Nazi rhetoric.

Up to now there has been little sign that Mr Musk’s endorsement or the fallout from the Magdeburg attack have tilted the campaign in the AfD’s favour.

The Times