Elon Musk’s AfD livestream has sent the German elites into meltdown
Alice Weidel’s dull, unenlightening conversation with Musk was hardly a propaganda coup.

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The reaction of German elites to Elon Musk’s interview with Alice Weidel, the AfD’s candidate for chancellor, has been little short of hysterical. Livestreamed on X last Thursday, the interview has been presented as a threat to German democracy – an attempt on the part of X owner Elon Musk to give undue weight to the hard-right AfD ahead of next month’s federal elections.
Germany’s public broadcaster, ARD, has called it a ‘perfect coup’ for the AfD. German universities, trade unions and even the Federal Court of Justice have announced their withdrawal from X in protest. According to one trade-union spokesperson, X is now openly pushing ‘anti-democracy and disinformation’. Robert Habeck, Germany’s hapless economics minister and the Green Party’s candidate for chancellor, says X could be giving the AfD an unfair advantage in the campaign. According to Politico, 150 EU officials are now monitoring how X’s algorithms are promoting the interview to see if any EU laws are being broken.
All this fuss… and over a single, hour-long conversation on X. Under normal circumstances, an interview with the leader of a political party that is consistently polling at over 20 per cent would be utterly unremarkable. You would expect to see interviews with leading candidates across a range of media.
But an interview with the leader of the AfD is different. Ever since the party was founded in 2013, it has been effectively No Platformed by Germany’s media and political elites. They have been determined to keep AfD politicians as far away from the public eye as possible. Musk has now shattered this informal agreement to deny the likes of Weidel an airing. He has allowed her to speak at length and in front of a huge international audience.
Yet the claim that this single interview may have given the AfD an unfair advantage in the run-up to the federal elections is more than a little disingenuous. The AfD has been consistently marginalised by German media over the past few years. At the same time, representatives from the Social Democratic Party, the Christian Democratic Union and the Greens have appeared on countless talkshows and featured in myriad interviews. If any party has been disadvantaged by media coverage, it’s the AfD. Last year, it was revealed that in at least 90 reports from anti-AfD rallies by state broadcasters ARD and ZDF, the supposedly ‘normal citizens’ they interviewed were politically active in the mainstream parties.
That media outlets have happily shunned the second-most popular party in Germany at the moment is not a surprise. The media have been dominated by those of a leftish, centrist hue for years. A 2020 survey of trainees at ARD revealed that 92 per cent of them would vote for the Greens (57 per cent), the Left Party (23 per cent) or the SPD (12 per cent). According to another longer-term study, 41 per cent of all journalists in Germany are Green-ish. No one said they were politically close to the AfD. One interview with Elon Musk is hardly going to boost the AfD’s fortunes.
Besides, the interview itself was hardly the AfD propaganda coup its opponents claim. It was conducted in English, which made it more difficult for Weidel to make herself understood. This will also have put many Germans off listening to it. Furthermore, X is not all that influential in Germany and is certainly not as well established as it is in the Anglophone world – there are only around 11million X users in Germany, compared with 23million in the UK.
Besides, it’s clear that Musk’s rather softball interview with Weidel was aimed at a global audience, not at the German public. Any German voters who had hoped to gain new insights into the AfD ahead of the federal election would have been left disappointed. Weidel is not a particularly engaging public speaker in German – and she is even worse in English. The interview was notable for her frequent bouts of nervous laughter, her long, rambling answers and her crude statements.
Asked about education, she claimed that children in German schools ‘only learn gender studies’, which is overstating it, to say the least. When Musk asked her whether she would defend Israel’s right to exist, she answered ‘yes’, but otherwise had little to say about the conflict in the Middle East. On the war in Ukraine, she simply expressed the hope that Trump would end the war as quickly as possible. That was it.
Far from promoting the AfD, the conversation exposed Weidel and her party’s lack of real political substance – beyond right-wing outrage. It was a reminder that the AfD owes its growing support chiefly to the failings of the established parties, rather than to its own merits.
Despite the AfD’s weaknesses, Germany’s elites remain terrified of it. Indeed, they are so frightened of any deviation from the establishment worldview that they are willing to treat a mere interview with an AfD leader as a threat to democracy. This is testament not just to their authoritarian instincts, but also to their own chronic political weakness.
Sabine Beppler-Spahl is spiked’s Germany correspondent.
Pictures by: Getty.
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