By Thomas Escritt

BERLIN (Reuters) – In his public journey to embrace the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany, Elon Musk has consistently boosted the online content of a young party supporter – changing the climate and skepticism of the COVID-19 lockdown Naomi Seibt.

Shortly after the polls closed in June for the European Parliament elections, in which the AfD performed strongly, Seibt announced that he had voted for the party in a post to his thousands of followers on X, the platform of Musk’s social media. An hour later, Musk answered a question.

“Why is there such a negative reaction from some about the AfD?” the Tesla (NASDAQ: ) chief executive asked in a public response. He followed up with a private message asking for more details, Seibt told Reuters in an interview. Reuters has not seen the private message.

“I explained to him that the AfD is not the same ideology as the Nazis or Hitler, but like the 19th century liberal nationalist movement … , who posted in English, describing their private exchange.

The billionaire businessman responded with a funny Roman Empire-themed meme, said Seibt, who has nearly 368,000 X followers.

Since Seibt was asked about the AfD in June, Musk has engaged publicly with the self-professed libertarian more than 40 times, after two previous engagements with him on the platform earlier that year, putting him on a small group of European influencers whose content he had. has been heavily associated in recent months, according to a Reuters review of his X posts.

Musk, who has more than 211 million followers on the platform, did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Reuters was unable to establish how influential Seibt’s content was on his thinking.

Seibt, who rose to prominence a few years ago posting content to oppose climate activist Greta Thunberg, said Musk sent him several direct messages asking about German politics at the same time. time. Reuters has not seen these posts.

By December, Musk’s public support for the AfD was clear, with his public posts saying the party would “save” Germany. Later on Thursday, he plans to interview X Alice Weidel, the party leader and candidate to become German chancellor in the general election scheduled for February 23.

The AfD has a range of conservative ideologies. It was running second in the polls before the election, which was called after the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-way coalition. Mainstream parties have said they will not work with the party, which was founded in 2013 and is classified by Germany’s domestic security service as a “suspected extremist organization.”

In recent years, the AfD has consolidated around a populist anti-Islamic worldview that opposes immigration. It wants to break up the EU and replace it with a looser trade bloc, and stop arming Ukraine.

It also pointed to an end to Germany’s redemption policy for World War II crimes. Its leading candidate for European Parliament elections resigned from the party in May amid public outcry, after declaring that members of the SS, the main Nazi paramilitary force, “were not all criminals”. .

Ned Richardson-Little, a historian at the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History Potsdam, said that while they are historically different parties, the AfD shares with the Nazis “a focus on recovering an imaginary lost glory in the German nation” while scapegoating minorities and railing against elites.

Germany’s weak economy along with concerns over immigration and war in Europe have damaged voters’ views of mainstream parties, helping the AfD’s standings in the polls.

The AfD did not respond to a request for comment.

Musk’s public interest in German and British politics has increased since the November election in the US, where he spent a quarter of a billion dollars to help Donald Trump return to the White House.

Musk has made no secret of his desire to see a similar shake-up of the political order across Europe, provoking the ire of some leaders across the continent, including in Germany where he has a car factory that employs thousands .

Reuters could not establish how much he was acting on Trump’s order, which appointed him joint head of a new government efficiency department. On Tuesday, the president-elect said “Elon’s doing a good job” when asked about his reaction to Musk’s statements about foreign affairs in Europe and elsewhere.

” DON’T SOUND EXTREMIST “

The first Musk post found by Reuters containing a reference to AdD came in September 2023, when he retweeted a post from a far-right Italian media outlet that talked about party. After an online backlash, two days later he posted that he personally did not support any party and did not know the AfD “from a hole in the ground.”

According to a review of subsequent posts on the platform, Musk did not appear to mention the AfD again until his June 9 response to Seibt’s post declaring his vote for the party, in which he said he had read , and that the party’s policies “do not sound extremist.”

Six months later, his views crystallized.

Between June and December, Musk mentioned the AfD twice in tweets, related to an attempt in Germany to ban the party.

Then, on December 20, Musk posted again, responding to Seibt, and said: “Only the AfD can save Germany.”

The post retweeted a video of Seibt, in which he blasted German election frontrunner Friedrich Merz for criticizing Musk.

The post comes on the same day as a car-ramming attack that killed six at a Christmas market, carried out by a Saudi-born man with strong anti-Islam views who has expressed support for AfD and Musk in online messages but whose motive remains. not clear.

Since the Dec. 20 post, Musk has mentioned the AfD by name at least six times in tweets and interacted with Seibt more than a dozen times on the platform, mostly about German politics.

In late December, he doubled down on support for the AfD in a column in a German newspaper, saying it was wrong to call it far-right or compare it to Hitler, because Weidel, the Mandarin -speaking party leader, raising same-sex children born in Sri Lanka.

Seibt told Reuters that based on their conversations, he believed that when Musk asked about the AfD at X he had already explored the issue. “That’s not something that comes out of nowhere,” he said.

His embrace of the AfD coincided with a series of attacks on Britain’s government and support from a growing number of members of the country’s far-right.

In recent weeks, he has reignited the debate over a child sex scandal in Britain, calling a female minister an apologist for “rape genocide” against white women and clashing with his new ally Nigel Farage over Musk’s support for jailed hard-right leader Tommy Robinson.

“LET THE GERMAN GUILT GO AWAY”

Seibt’s posts are often consistent with Musk’s talking points, including in recent days support for Robinson. His videos are filled with praise for X along with a catchphrase popular with Musk – “the woke mind virus.”

In two X posts this week about Britain’s child sex scandal, which has been resurfaced by Musk’s attacks on the Labor government and his support for Robinson, Seibt said he was a victim of sexual abuse and grooming as a child. Reuters did not verify the comments.

Seibt says he is not far right but voted for the AfD so it could tackle immigration.

“I want to eliminate all German guilt,” he added, referring to the German culture of atonement for Nazi crimes, including the Holocaust of European Jews. “I didn’t do anything that was said to have been done by my ancestors,” he said.

Seibt is currently traveling the US in the run-up to Trump’s inauguration on January 20, crashing at the homes of other X political influencers, he said.

He hopes to attend the inauguration as the “plus one” of another influencer, Nick Sortor, he said. There, he hopes to finally meet Musk in person. Trump’s transition team and Sortor did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Seibt has been a prominent figure on right-wing social media since his school days in the German university town of Muenster. As a child he was plagued by poor health and never knew his father, he said.

Seibt has dedicated himself to online activism since dropping out of university after one semester of economics, he said.

In 2019, he met the British climate skeptic Christopher Monckton who connected him to the Heartland Institute, a US-based think tank that works to deny climate change and doubts the damage caused by passive smoking.

Heartland paid him $4,000 a month for three months, in what he described as a scholarship, he said. Heartland did not respond to a request for comment.

Musk’s acquisition of X helped raise his profile.

“When I saw in 2022 that Twitter was bought by Elon, I didn’t know what was going to happen,” he said. “But I know one thing: I can trust this Elon Musk guy.”