In the last decade or more, European governments have tried to resist the covert influence operations of adversaries such as Russia and China.

Now they face a very different challenge: fending off overt efforts by Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s MAGA movement to seize territory, oust elected leaders, and empower far-right causes and parties.

Even before taking office again, Mr. Trump is threatening – maybe seriously, maybe not – to acquire the territory of NATO allies like Canada and Denmark. And Mr. Musk, the president-elect’s biggest financial backer, is using his social media platform X to bring the far-right Alternative for Germany party into the mainstream and smear leaders of Britain’s centre-left Labor Party.

It is not clear whether Europe’s political immune system has the antibodies to defend against these new incursions.

This is not the first time that a Trump ally has tried to build a bridge with the European far right. Throughout 2018 and 2019, Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon held meetings with far-right politicians across Europe. But the political landscape is very different now. The governments of Germany and France collapsed; far-right parties are on the rise in those countries, and are already in power in several others across the continent.

A senior official from the first Trump administration, who is in line for an even more senior role in the second, was blunt in his assessment: Europe, he said, has no idea what’s in store for it.

‘A very rich person who expresses his opinion’

Musk spent $250 million of his $400 billion fortune to help Donald Trump get re-elected. He probably had as much influence on American politics through his own notoriety and ownership of X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter.

He campaigned aggressively against Kamala Harris (in one instance sharing a fake video describing her as a “diversity hire” who “knows nothing about running a country”) and interviewed Trump live on the platform. He is now applying a similar game in Europe.

In Britain, Mr. Musk revived the decade-old “grooming gangs” scandal. this took place while Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose centre-left Labor Party is in power, was head of public prosecutions.

Fueling the fire ignited by the right-wing media, Mr Musk called Mr Starmer “utterly despicable” and said he should be “in jail”. Last week he asked his 212 million followers to vote on whether “America should free the people of Britain from their tyrannical government”.

According to British media reports, Mr. Musk is also considering a $100 million donation to Britain’s far-right Reform Party, which would be the country’s largest political donation ever. The party’s leader, Nigel Farage, one of the main campaigners for Brexit, has met with Trump several times, most recently at Mar-a-Lago last month.

“MAGA hates Starmer,” a former Trump administration official told The Times. He spoke on condition of anonymity to share his candid views as he is being considered for a role in another Trump administration.

“MAGA loves Meloni,” he added, referring to Italy’s right-wing Prime Minister Giorgio Meloni, “as long as she meets her deportation goals.”

Musk’s SpaceX is also in talks with Ms Meloni’s government to provide secure military communications through its Starlink satellite network. At the press conference last weekshe described Mr. Musk as “a very wealthy person who speaks his mind.”

‘Musk normalizes us’

In Germany, where early federal elections are being held next month, Mr. Musk is urging voters to vote for the far-right AfD, offering it legitimacy that has long been denied to a party under the watchful eye of Germany’s domestic intelligence service because of its ties to neo-Nazis.

In an article for a major German newspaper published on December 28 he called the AfD the last “spark of hope” for Germany. The country, he said, is “tottering on the edge of economic and cultural collapse.”

On Thursday he broadcast live a 75-minute conversation with Alice Weidelthe AfD candidate for chancellor, on X, giving her the same platform he gave Trump five months earlier.

Since Musk first endorsed the AfD in December, Weidel’s X posts have routinely gone viral, in part because Musk reposts them, along with a number of neo-Nazi accounts that have been reactivated and boosted. Researchers observing the online scene say Far-right German influencers now post on X in English to get Musk’s attention.

Germans will not vote for the AfD just because an American billionaire asks them to. But social media is a tool that can change public opinion, taking ideas that were once considered extreme and inserting them into the mainstream over time.

What has kept the AfD out of power despite becoming the country’s second most popular party is a national taboo against collaborating with the far right. The memory of Hitler, who formed a coalition with centrist conservatives, has held up this protective wall until now.

“The firewall between the AfD and the White House is officially gone and that makes the German firewall look ridiculous,” AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla told me. “Musk normalizes us.”

Overt vs Covert

American influence campaigns in other countries are not new. During the Cold War, America supported friendly nations and countries and intervened – sometimes aggressively – in countries that were considered ideological adversaries.

But now it appears that the MAGA movement is deliberately sowing discord among America’s allies. This is disorienting for Europeans who grew up absorbing American lessons on democracy after World War II.

“I cannot think of a comparable case of meddling in the election campaign of a friendly country in the history of Western democracies,” said Friedrich Merz, leader and chancellor candidate of the center-right Christian Democrats. His party is leading in the polls, but will need a coalition partner to form a government.

The United States remains the main guarantor of European security, as the war in Ukraine has shown. It is also Europe’s largest export market, which is why the possibility of introducing tariffs represents a strong threat to European economies. And Europe has no technology companies on par with those coming out of Silicon Valley, including Mr. Musk’s Platform X and his Space X satellite company.

Europe’s dependence on Russian energy has long hampered its response to Kremlin interference. But the dependence is much greater in the case of the United States.

Let’s add to that that the American interference is not hidden, it happens in broad daylight, which makes it even more difficult to retaliate.

Exploitation of existing complaints

Influencer campaigns work best when they tap into existing grievances. As in the United States, Europe’s trust in institutions fell after the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic. Voters have become more hostile to immigration and more concerned about the cost of living and the economy. There is a growing sense that centrist leaders on the left and right have failed them on these issues.

Millions of people in Europe are angry with the establishment, said Matthew Goodwin, a conservative author and commentator. “It wasn’t orchestrated by Trump or Musk.”

“Musk did not create the AfD,” Mr Goodwin added. “It helps the AfD that it gets their attention, but the underlying driver of that is the political choices made over the last decade.”

The provocations of Mr. Muska in Europe may have been designed for maximum chaos, not electoral success. in Britain, he destroyed Nigel Faragethe leader of the extreme right Reformist Party, after Mr. Farage refused to support Mr. Musk wants the far-right agitator to be released from prison.

“Both the Kremlin and the forces around the libertarian-authoritarian camp around Musk want to sow chaos in Europe and get rid of liberal democratic elites,” Thorsten Benner, director of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin, told the German newspaper Die Zeit. . “We have to arm ourselves against it. But the greatest danger to our democracies comes not from without, but from within. Those running election campaigns should focus on issues that concern voters.”

Similar levels of internal strife and chaos also exist within the wider MAGA movement. In the United States, there are signs that those in Mr. Trump’s hardline inner circle are against immigration they bored Mr. Muskespecially after the row over whether the country should expand work visas for highly skilled immigrants. In an interview for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera on Sunday, Mr. Bannon called Mr. Musk “truly evil” and vowed to “take this guy down.”

Whatever the direct impact of American interference on the political map of Europe in the coming years, Trump is determined to implement his priorities in Europe whoever is in government.

“At the end of the day, Trump is going to be so much more aggressive with Europe in terms of uncompromisingly advocating the US position that it doesn’t really matter who’s in charge,” said a former Trump official. “Their key thing is America First. Everything else is a distraction. Trump will use American power to get his way.”