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Elon Musk, having spent much of 2024 inveigling himself into a position of power in U.S. politics, has a new target in his sights for this year: Europe. Musk has enjoyed sticking his oar into politics on my side of the Atlantic for a while now. He’s been courting a friendship with Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s far-right prime minister, and he posted on X in support of the leader of the Italian anti-immigration Lega party earlier this year. Before Christmas, Musk posted his views on the annulment of Romania’s presidential election, and in the dying days of 2024, Musk posted on X in support of a far-right German political party with neo-Nazi ties called AfD, then followed with an endorsement in a national paper.
But the last fortnight or so has seen a significant uptick in Musk’s campaign to draw attention to himself in the U.K. specifically. He has had a bee in his bonnet about the U.K.’s Labour government since it came to power and has claimed that “civil war” is inevitable in Britain over prison overcrowding. This week, Musk authored a flurry of new posts about U.K. politics, including calling for the jailed far-right figure Tommy Robinson, a man who has pleaded guilty to multiple criminal convictions, to be freed, and saying that Prime Minister Keir Starmer should be in prison himself. Why? Because Starmer was the director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013, a time when various child sex abuse rings were uncovered in England. Those rings are back in the news this week because there has been some debate over whether a national government–led inquiry into what happened is preferable to a local one. Musk seized on this to push claims Starmer covered up the child abuse. Then, on Sunday, Musk posted that Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s right-wing Reform UK party, and as recently as Sunday morning a vocal ally of Musk, was not fit for the job and that the party needed “a new leader” because Farage refused to back his support for Robinson.
Perhaps, if you’re unfamiliar with U.K. politics, you are reading all of the above and finding it hard to follow. That would be fair enough. But the same is clearly true of Musk. He has waded into complex, long-running elements of political culture here that he does not understand any better than you do. And yet, because of Musk’s new position in the incoming U.S. government, where European leaders might previously have felt comfortable ignoring a slew of misinformed tweets from some rich guy, now they have to engage with them. I daresay they find it infuriating.
Starmer had to, during a conference this week about the National Health Service, address Musk’s posts, although he didn’t mention him by name, saying, “Those who are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible are not interested in victims. They’re interested in themselves.” France’s Emmanuel Macron too weighed in this week, intoning, “Ten years ago, who would have imagined that the owner of one of the world’s largest social networks would be supporting a new international reactionary movement.” Germany’s Olaf Scholz used his New Year’s Eve address to the nation to hit back at Musk (although he also failed to use Musk’s name), noting, “Where Germany goes from here will be decided by you—the citizens. It will not be decided by the owners of social media channels.” (Germany has a quite-consequential election coming next month.)
The reasons for Musk’s shift rightward are well documented, and his turn to Trump appears fairly canny. His message has appealed to certain backwaters in the American public. For all his cringe-inducing behavior, he does seem to get America and what might play well with the American right. But this latest barrage of posts aimed at Europe demonstrates that he has no such canniness when it comes to foreign affairs.
If the idea is to gain political influence in Europe by the same means he gained it in the U.S.— i.e., throwing money around and talking loudly—he’s not going about it in a smart manner. The Oldham sex abuse gangs Musk is referring to have been the subject of wider-ranging sexual-abuse inquiries for some time, and the initial breaking of that story happened more than a decade ago. The Crown Prosecution Service is certainly not above criticism, but few here would argue that Starmer’s actions as its head with these cases was anything other than proper. For his part, Robinson is a toxic, fringe figure in U.K. politics. It has become the party line for even prominent right-wingers, like Farage, to distance themselves from him; he is old news anyway, having been out of the U.K. press for a good while now. Going against Farage in favor of some other candidate to lead Reform UK is also not a clever move. There’s nobody else even half ready to step into that role, and consequently no noise about who that could or should be. Musk is having a conversation with himself here.
It’s all just quite embarrassing. Musk endorsed a post that called on King Charles to dissolve Parliament and throw out the government, actions that the king has no power to perform. And why would Musk know that? It’s none of his business. On the AfD, he has posted things like: “The portrayal of the AfD as far-right is clearly wrong considering that Alice Weidel, the leader of the party, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!” This analysis is, um, incomplete.
On the one hand, when Musk makes these posts, perhaps he’s not really talking to us Europeans. He’s posturing for the benefit of his American audience. This week, he conducted a poll on X about whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” The wording was telling. Some Americans might like the idea of Americans liberating the people of America from “tyranny,” but why would British people want Americans saving them from anything?
On the other hand, as evidenced by writing the pro-AfD op-ed for the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, he really is actively trying to talk to us.
Luckily, I don’t think all that many people in Europe are interested in listening. In a recent U.K. poll, two-thirds of respondents said outright that Musk “should not become influential” in British politics. But it is depressing to see politicians here having to waste their time engaging with the ill-informed whims of a man who by rights should have no influence on our political systems. And exasperating to see the return, inevitable from the moment Trump was reelected, of a political agenda set by the social media habits of a few trigger-happy morons.
Is Trump going to keep tolerating Musk making this much attention-seeking noise once he comes to power? The soon-to-be-reinaugurated American president has yet to comment on Musk’s recent rantings. Perhaps he approves. But it seems more likely to me that there isn’t going to be room for two such attention-hungry egos at the top levels of U.S. government. Let us hope so, anyway.
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