Elon Musk became the richest man in the world by taking on established industries with disruptive start-ups like PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX. He’s now using a similar playbook to upend European politics.
Mr. Musk has been using the algorithmic influence of his social media platform X to place bets on far-right upstart parties, like Alternative for Germany (known as the AfD) and Britain’s Reform Party, that challenge the status quo.
His taboo-shattering stunts — like his straight-armed salutes at Donald Trump’s inauguration event — have garnered plenty of attention and outrage. On Saturday, two days before the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, he told an AfD rally that Germany had “too much of a focus on past guilt.”
But there’s a deeper reason the establishment is worried: His provocative efforts are aimed at a system that is already in crisis. The legacy European parties that used to represent huge constituencies no longer command the trust and support of voters.
They are ripe for disruption.
Well before Mr. Musk first backed the AfD, it had become the second most-popular party in Germany. The Social Democrats, the country’s oldest party which once routinely won more than 40 percent of the vote, are polling at a historic low of 16 percent ahead of next month’s election. The Christian Democrats are favored to win, but are on course to do so with less than a third of the vote. And Britain’s Labour Party, which returned to power last June with only a third of the vote, has slumped to a 20 percent approval rating in polls.
In both countries, voters are upset about years of stagnant growth, declining public services, rising immigration and a generalized sense that their children will be worse off than they are. They feel that their governments have failed to tackle these problems — and that whomever they elect among the traditional parties, the outcome barely changes.
“Musk is using the existing party system, showing its complicity and its hollowness” to channel voters’ anger, said Quinn Slobodian, a professor of international history at Boston University and the author of “Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy.”
“He’s sort of hacking the democratic process as it exists now and showing us where the vulnerabilities are,” he added. “The question is whether or not we know how to fix them, or if it’s such a problematic virus bug that it’s going to spread through the whole system.”
Ripe for Disruption
Musk is tapping into very real grievances.
Germany, Europe’s largest economy and one-time economic engine, has not grown in five years. Its flagship carmakers, long the pride of the country’s manufacturing base, are struggling to compete with Chinese rivals (and Tesla). In Britain, a decade of austerity has left the national health service, the closest thing to a national religion, reeling, and schools literally crumbling.
“Musk and Trump look at Europe as this ossified old continent whose moral arrogance is totally out of step with economic data,” said Ulf Poschardt, editor in chief of the conservative German newspaper Die Welt. The paper’s Sunday edition ran an opinion piece by Musk this month that endorsed the AfD. “Musk is firing with a shotgun into tired, inflamed societies waiting to see how they react.”
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. economy has almost doubled in size, while the European Union’s has grown less than 20 percent. An aging population and falling birthrates mean that Europe’s population will peak next year, creating an almost impossible dilemma for politicians: Voters have become hostile to immigration at the very moment when their countries need more workers.
Europe’s political story has become one of decline: public services under pressure, crumbling infrastructure and industries struggling to compete with more dynamic foreign companies. Governments that claim to work for ordinary people often fail to deliver.
Mainstream parties have struggled to offer big ideas in response to these big problems. Instead, voters often feel like transformative changes are off the table, and elected governments are not responsive to their needs and frustrations.
“And so yeah, Musk is bullying them,” Mr. Poschardt said. “Musk is a disrupter. He has disrupted a bunch of industries. Now he is having fun disrupting politics.”
There is also a widespread perception that the center-left and center-right parties that have traded power for decades have become mostly indistinguishable. For three out of the four terms that Angela Merkel governed Germany as chancellor, her conservatives joined in a “grand coalition” with the Social Democrats — a configuration that many see as the likeliest outcome of next month’s election.
Merkel repeatedly defended her policies by calling them “alternativlos” — without alternative — in an attempt to shut down debate.
Alternative for Germany was named and shaped in opposition to that idea. Its leaders are trying to style themselves as the only viable alternative to an amorphous mainstream, which they call the “Uni Party.”
“People have the impression that they can’t change anything anyway and then find it fascinating when individuals like Musk or Trump have such disruptive power: They embody the power that citizens believe they no longer have,” said Matthias Quent, professor of sociology at Magdeburg-Stendal University, and author of “Germany Far Right.”
Far-right start-ups
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Although the far right has a long history in Europe, parties like the AfD, France’s National Rally and Italy’s Brothers of Italy began to win more support during the migration crisis of 2015, when more than a million people entered Europe by land and sea, many of them from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.
Many far-right parties built a populist case with positions that were taboo within the mainstream, such as opposition to Muslim immigration. Now, as discontent grows, that profile can be rebranded as a broader willingness to take on the political establishment.
Savvy populists often use provocative statements as evidence that the establishment feels threatened by their bold truth-telling. “If your brand is rebel and your brand is scandal, of course it doesn’t hurt you to say these outrageous things,” said Dorothy Kronick, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied the rise of populist leaders in South America.
Mr. Musk, who had a similar brand himself after years of online provocations, has taken easily to that strategy. “It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” he said in his video speech at the AfD rally this weekend. “We don’t want everything to be the same everywhere where it’s just one big sort of soup.”
President Trump harnessed a similar dynamic in his successful presidential campaigns, aided most recently by Mr. Musk’s social media machinery, vast riches and reputation for technological innovation. Now Europe’s far-right parties hope to take similar advantage of the political moment.
“The winners of the last 25 years of the American economy are lining up with Trump, and were there on the podium with him at the inauguration,” Mr. Slobodian, the author, said. “That’s a banal version of the future. But it’s one that looks like where the money is.”
Disruption without innovation
Having the right brand for the political moment is not the same as having actual solutions for governance.
On the far-right’s signature issue, most mainstream economists say that reducing immigration would further damage Europe’s sluggish economies, particularly as the population ages and relies on a shrinking pool of native-born workers to support retirees and the welfare state.
It may be useful to think of Mr. Musk and his allies as hackers skilled at identifying and exploiting the current system’s weaknesses, rather than innovators who can build something better to replace it.
In Britain, he abruptly turned on the Reform Party leader Nigel Farage, after Mr. Farage refused to back Tommy Robinson, an imprisoned far-right agitator whom Mr. Musk has publicly supported.
Silicon Valley has an ethos of placing bets on many start-ups, expecting that most will fail but a few will have outrageous and outsize success. It’s far from certain that approach will succeed in politics. And while disrupting an industry like banking or car manufacturing can lead to better, more efficient products, disrupting a political system can be a path to chaos and mismanagement — or even democratic instability and violence.
“When a business is destroyed, a new one may arise, but that may be in a completely different field. When democracy is destroyed, a different social and ruling order emerges that does not have to adhere to the rules of the old ones,” said Mr. Quent, the sociologist.
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