Elon Musk appeared at a rally for the Alternative for Germany party on Saturday.Sebastian Willnow/AP
Because Elon Musk apparently did not create enough controversy for his liking this week, the tech billionaire also made a virtual appearance on Saturday at a rally for the extremist, right-wing, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party ahead of the country’s snap elections next month.
Musk told the crowd that he considers the party to be the “best hope” for Germany. The rally reportedly consisted of about 4,500 people, including the party leader, Alice Weidel, in the city of Halle.
“It’s okay to be proud to be German,” Musk said. “This is a very important principle. It’s okay, it’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.”
He also said that the country needed to “move on” from “past guilt,” interpreted by many as referring to the Holocaust. “Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents,” Musk said. Confusingly, Musk—a South African tech billionaire—also lamented “too much control from, sort of, global elite” in German affairs, adding, “There should be more determination by individual countries.”
In addition to those hypocrisies, Musk also peddled at least one straight-up falsehood: He claimed Germany is “an ancient nation, [that] goes back thousands of years”—but the German Empire was founded in 1871.
Elon Musk‘s great speech at our party convention! Make America & Germany great again! 🇺🇸🇩🇪 pic.twitter.com/XHtMIBfOYh
— Alice Weidel (@Alice_Weidel) January 26, 2025
He concluded by claiming “the future of civilization could hang on this election,” before leaving the cheering crowd with the three words Trump yelled after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania: “Fight, fight, fight!”
Unsurprisingly, Musk’s latest comments led to widespread condemnation. Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, said in a post on X: “Contrary to @elonmusk advice, the remembrance and acknowledgement of the dark past of the country and its people should be central in shaping the German society. Failing to do so is an insult to the victims of Nazism and a clear danger to the democratic future of Germany.” Donald Tusk, the prime minister of Poland, said: “The words we heard from the main actors of the AfD rally about “Great Germany” and “the need to forget German guilt for Nazi crimes” sounded all too familiar and ominous. Especially only hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz,” referring to the 80th anniversary, which falls on Monday.
Sen. Lindsey Graham: “I’m worried that 80 years on, we’re rewriting history here.”
On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told host Dana Bash, “What he said does bother me,” also referencing the upcoming anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation. “I’m worried that 80 years on, we’re rewriting history here,” Graham added. “I want every German child, every American child, to know what happened and that it’s true, not a lie, and we never do it again.”
“What he says does bother me… I’m worried that 80 years on, that we’re rewriting history here.”@LindseyGrahamSC reacts to Elon Musk telling a right-wing political party in Germany that there’s “too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that.” pic.twitter.com/E9qjL9YOTV
— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) January 26, 2025
As my colleague Alex Nguyen has written, AfD is controversial even among Europe’s nationalists:
In May, France’s far-right party led by Marine Le Pen split from the AfD in its European Parliament coalition after the German party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, said that a person was “not automatically a criminal” just because they had been a member of the SS, Adolph Hitler’s paramilitary organization.
The party is also, like Trump, a fan of mass deportations of immigrants, which they term “remigration,” as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote about last year. (Weidel also used the word at the rally on Saturday.) As Mother Jones contributor Josh Axelrod, a Berlin-based reporter, wrote for us last month:
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.
Musk’s virtual appearance at the Saturday rally is just his latest show of support for the party, which has also included publishing an op-ed in support of them in one of Germany’s biggest newspapers last month, as I wrote then. He also interviewed Weidel, the party leader, on X earlier this month.
The party is still polling in second place, at 20 percent. But the resistance to their rise is also strong: The Associated Press reported that tens of thousands of Germans protested the AfD in Berlin and other cities on Saturday.
