Elon Musk is throwing grenades into Europe’s political mainstream over issues ranging from immigration to free speech, creating a dilemma for governments as they try to respond to the tech billionaire and key adviser to the incoming Trump administration.
In recent days and weeks, Musk has weighed in with a series of incendiary social-media posts on European politics, including supporting a far-right party ahead of an election in Germany, accusing the British prime minister of being complicit in rape , denouncing judges in Italy and slamming the European Commission.
The stream of posts from the world’s richest man has morphed into a diplomatic headache and caught several mainstream European political parties on the back foot. Just weeks ahead of Donald Trump ’s inauguration, many European leaders have been wary of publicly calling out Musk, worried it would damage relations with Trump and simply prod the tech entrepreneur to double down on his attacks.
But the repeated posts to his 211 million followers on X, the social-media platform he owns, are now setting the news agenda in several of those countries, making it impossible to ignore. Europe’s unpopular leaders worry that Musk could use X to mobilize disenchanted voters at a time when weak economic growth has eroded trust in mainstream politics and stoked political instability.
“Ten years ago if someone had told us the owner of one of the world’s biggest social-media companies would support a new international reactionary movement and intervene directly in elections, including in Germany, who would have imagined that?” French President Emmanuel Macron told ambassadors on Monday.
Musk’s bare-knuckle approach to foreign affairs highlights the challenge that U.S. allies face in navigating the next Trump presidency. The last time Trump was in the White House, foreign governments had to deal with his unpredictable late-night social media statements. Now they also have to digest Musk’s.
Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer spent a large chunk of a press conference Monday that was supposed to focus on the country’s overstretched health system instead rebutting Musk’s posts about the prime minister’s record in jailing child rapists during a previous stint as the U.K.’s chief prosecutor over a decade ago. Starmer said he was “not going to individualize this to Elon Musk or anyone else” but also spent several minutes defending his record and denouncing those “that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible.”
Ahead of Starmer’s press conference, Musk had pinned a message to the top of his X feed: “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” Starmer declined to comment on this.
European politicians and business people opine on U.S. politics all the time—often to criticize Trump—but few have any influence on U.S. voters. Political strategists, however, fear Musk could tilt the playing field by wielding his X platform as a powerful tool to campaign for parties he backs.
In Germany, some strategists and politicians worry Musk’s personal views could end up influencing a general election this February. Musk last year called German Chancellor Olaf Scholz a “fool” and in recent weeks threw his weight behind Germany’s far-right AfD party. He is hosting a live chat on X this week with AfD co-chair Alice Weidel and wrote an op-ed in a prominent German newspaper calling her party “the last spark of hope for this country.”
The AfD is further to the right than most other comparable antiestablishment, anti-immigration parties in Europe. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has classified some of the AfD‘s regional chapters as extremist organizations. The party’s draft electoral platform says sanctions against Russia should be lifted, Germany’s foreign and energy policy freed of American influences, and Germany should leave the EU. Some of the party’s leaders have criticized Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance.
Musk’s endorsement “is a welcome counterpoint to the negative campaign against us that’s happening everyday in Germany” and could be a “game-changer,” said Leif-Erik Holm, a senior AfD lawmaker.
Friedrich Merz , chairman of the center-right CDU and, according to polls, the most likely winner of the February vote, told German media that Musk’s intervention was “intrusive and presumptuous,” adding that “I cannot remember a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country in the history of Western democracies.”
Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon tried to build a network of right-wing parties ahead of elections for the EU parliament back in 2019, with limited effect. Musk, by focusing on domestic European elections and armed with a social-media company, could be more successful, says José Ignacio Torreblanca, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank. “He sees himself as a savior of U.S. democracy from the progressives,” Torreblanca said. “He thinks this should not stop at home and that it should continue in Europe.”
Still, there are hurdles. In Britain, for instance, only 26% of people have a positive view of Musk, the same level as Starmer, according to pollster YouGov , and average daily users of X has dropped from 10.3 million a day in May 2022 to 8.6 million in May 2024, according to the regulator Ofcom. X’s own figures show the average number of active users across the EU is down around 5 million between October 2023 and summer of 2024.
The EU commission, the bloc’s executive branch, said on Monday that it was considering expanding an existing probe into X to include the livestream Musk is hosting with Germany’s AfD.
“You’re free to express your views, but there are certain limits to that,” commission spokesman Thomas Regnier told reporters on Monday. Musk has previously said he would challenge any EU findings against X in court. The EU’s Digital Services Act allows the commission to issue fines of up to 6% of global revenue.
Given that Musk oversees some six companies, including SpaceX and Tesla, and is also co-chair of a new U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, some European officials express astonishment that he has the bandwidth to lavish attention on their countries’ domestic affairs.
In Germany, Daniel Tapp, Weidel’s spokesman, said the party had been in contact with Musk’s staff as far back as before the European election last summer after they requested documents about the AfD platform. The December endorsement, however, came as a surprise, he said.
Britain has been a particular target for Musk. His X feed over the weekend was dominated by posts criticizing Starmer for not doing more to prosecute gangs made up mostly of Muslim men of Pakistani heritage who groomed and raped more than a thousand young girls in towns across Britain in a scandal that dates back to over a decade.
Independent reviews criticized British police for turning a blind eye to the gangs, partly because they didn’t believe the victims and partly because officers feared they would be accused of racism if they acted against the men from minority backgrounds.
Starmer says he reopened several closed cases linked to the child grooming rings when he was chief prosecutor and overhauled the way such crimes were prosecuted.
Musk also repeatedly called for the release of Tommy Robinson , a far-right activist currently in a British prison for contempt of court after repeating a false claim against a Syrian refugee. Musk fell out with Nigel Farage , the populist leader of the right-wing Reform party, over the weekend after Farage said he wouldn’t support Robinson joining Reform.
In contrast, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is one of the few Western European leaders whom Musk admires. The pair have met several times since Meloni won power in late 2022. The right-wing Italian leader is more attuned than most of her European peers with Musk’s opinions on immigration, falling birthrates and “wokeism.”
Meloni, in an interview with newspaper Corriere della Sera published Friday, said that while she sometimes disagrees with Musk, “it makes me laugh how people who until yesterday hailed Musk as a genius now depict him as a monster, just because he chose what is considered the ‘wrong’ side of the barricades.”
Write to Max Colchester at Max.Colchester@wsj.com and Bertrand Benoit at bertrand.benoit@wsj.com
