The Nazis first entered regional power in 1930. It was in the Eastern state of Thuringia where the Nazis first held ministerial-level posts. Three years later, Adolf Hitler became chancellor.
Nearly a century on, the far-right in Germany is once again in the ascendancy. Echoing this dark history, last September, on the very date Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, a far-right party won a regional election for the first time in Germany’s post-war history.
The anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) won in Thuringia with a third of the vote. In Saxony, it received 30.6 percent, just fractionally behind the CDU winners at 31.9 percent.
Its infamous leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, has twice been of knowingly using Nazi slogans at political events. And last year there were over revelations that members of the AfD had attended a meeting with Austrian neo-Nazis to discuss the mass deportation of migrants, asylum seekers, and German citizens of foreign origin deemed to have failed to integrate.
But these connections appear to be of little concern to US tech billionaire Elon Musk.
Ahead of federal elections next month, Elon Musk took to his social media platform X to : "Only the AfD can save Germany," labelling Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, "an incompetent fool" and describing President Frank-Walter Steinmeier as an "anti-democratic tyrant."
He then doubled down on his remarks with an op-ed in one of Germany’s biggest newspapers, Die Welt, claiming the AFD was "the last spark of hope for this country." And he has also announced that he will hold a live discussion this week with the AfD’s chancellor candidate Alice Weidel on X.
Musk, with 200 million Twitter followers, and control of the X platform itself, is an incredibly powerful ally for the far-right. His interventions shape the news agenda and become talking points for several days.
One only has to look at Musk’s business interests to understand why the multi-billionaire is so invested in Germany’s political future.
In his piece, he praised the AfD for its plans to "reduce government overregulation, lower taxes and deregulate the market." Musk recently opened a Tesla plant in Brandenburg which stands to directly benefit from such economic policies.
Stoking the fire
This isn’t the first time the Tesla tycoon has sought to influence political elections.
He contributed a quarter of a billion dollars to US President-elect Donald Trump's election campaign and took to his personal fiefdom X on multiple occasions to amplify tweets supporting him.
He also voters in swing states $1 million if they pledged support for the First and Second Amendments to the US Constitution on free speech and gun rights in the run-up to the election.
Now his sights are set on the UK. In December, Musk was pictured with Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right Reform party, and Nick Candy, the party’s billionaire treasurer, in front of a painting of Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago, the US president-elect’s estate in Florida. There was talk of Musk donating over to the Reform Party.
In recent days, however, he has turned his fire on Farage, calling for him to be replaced as leader of Reform UK. Why? Because even Farage isn’t sufficiently far-right enough for Musk.
In the past few days, Musk has taken to X to that Tommy Robinson, a notorious Islamophobe, is a political prisoner.
Tommy Robinson is in jail for contempt of court after he repeated false claims against a Syrian refugee who had been physically attacked at school despite being instructed by a court not to do so.
Robinson has previously described Muslims as enemy combatants. , the Finsbury Park terror attacker, became obsessed with Muslims in just one month after reading his posts. Just five months ago, racist rioters in Hartlepool sang his name as they smashed up homes and engaged in racist violence.
Farage’s refusal to support Tommy Robinson has been enough for Musk to deem him unfit to lead the Reform Party. Last year, during the worst outbreak of racist violence in living memory, Musk’s X platform was used to spread disinformation. The tech billionaire himself spread disinformation and stoked the flames of bigotry, claiming ""
He repeatedly gave credence to the myth of "two-tier policing" and claimed the government was cracking down on free speech for prosecuting those who took part in violent attacks or incited violence. At one point, he shared aclaiming Keir Starmer was considering sending far-right rioters to “emergency detainment camps” in the Falklands.
Subscribe Now and Listen to our Podcasts OnNow, Musk has attempted to link Robinson’s imprisonment to a concerted far-right campaign to exploit the very serious issue of child abuse to spread racism and to attack the current government. He suggested that the King dissolve parliament over the issue and that the UK government should be overthrown.
He has spread disinformation about child sexual abuse in Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer was deeply complicit in mass rapes "in exchange for votes." And he has described the safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips as a "rape genocide apologist" which has led to her receiving .
Once again, Musk’s interventions have shaped political debate. His attacks on Labour have led to right-wing Conservative and Reform parties jumping on the bandwagon, with the issue of grooming gangs making headline news for several days.
Most of the world, particularly the younger generation, gets their news from social media. And the far-right are increasingly dominating these platforms.
Eight in 10 young people in the UK use social media for news. The balance of power has shifted. Racist voices, once considered unpalatable for the mainstream, now have the backing of billionaires, MPs, TV channels and social media platforms. And, increasingly, there is a global alignment of the far-right.
Fascism goes global
Two decades ago, Tommy Robinson was nothing more than a local loudmouth. He founded the English Defence League in a disused warehouse in Luton in 2009.
It was a rag-tag group of hundreds of anti-Muslim racists, loosely affiliated with football hooligan firms. They had a street presence but remained on the fringes of British politics — roundly condemned by politicians across the political spectrum.
The EDL, riven by internal divisions between more uncontrollable hardline neo-Nazi elements, would quickly fall apart after a few years.
Today, however, Robinson is an international poster boy of the far-right, maintaining close connections with far-right groups around the world. It’s not just Musk who has got behind him. Pro-Israel think tank, , previously spent £47,000 on Robinson’s legal fees and three demonstrations in support of him.
Robinson also enjoyed a handsome salary of £5,000 a month as part of a fellowship for Rebel Media, a Canadian far-right media outlet — financed by US tech billionaire Robert Shillman. , the former White House Chief Strategist, described Robinson as "the backbone" of Britain.
When Robinson was previously imprisoned on contempt of court charges, 2.2 million tweets were posted in his defence within the space of several months with the hashtag #freetommy. An conducted by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that more than 40% of the tweets came from the US, with significant volumes from Canada, the Netherlands and nine other countries.
Robinson’s support is no longer confined to a few fringe elements in towns and cities across the UK. He is part of a well-funded network of far-right influencers seeking to spread Islamophobia. Increasingly, far-right politicians are singing from the same hymn sheet. Whether it’s the Hindutva "love jihad" conspiracy in India or a moral panic about Muslim refugees across Europe, the aim is to depict Muslims as a suspect community to be confronted.
And now far-right politicians are winning power on a platform of anti-Muslim hate too. Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ), founded by a Nazi SS officer, won of the vote in September elections.
France’s National Front, which counted a member of the Nazi Waffen SS military unit as its chancellor for its first 9 years, won of the vote in the second round of Legislative elections in July. Brothers of Italy, led by Mussolini lover Giorgia Meloni currently governs Italy. In half a dozen other EU countries — Finland, Hungary, Slovakia, Sweden, Croatia and the Czech Republic — far-right parties either form governments or are part of a governing coalition.
Increasingly, there is cross-border collaboration in an attempt to build an international consensus depicting migrants and Muslims as a threat. Farage has given speeches at Trump rallies while Steve Bannon has toured Europe, seeking to set up an international far-right organisation.
We are now living in a new era of far-right power. A transnational chorus of nationalists, picking up on moral panics abroad to push their anti-migrant rhetoric at home. On the more extreme end of the scale, American neo-Nazis have helped to start a chain of far-right training clubs across the UK known as
Meanwhile, the threat of far-right terrorism continues to grow. It’s worth remembering that Norwegian neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Breivik who killed 77 people, laid out his ideological position in English. His manifesto contained numerous references to British journalists and issues in the UK. And he had previously with members of the English Defence League, attending a demonstration in 2010.
Many in positions of power and influence have given the politics Breivik represents the veneer of respectability. An anti-elite narrative railing against globalisation is today bankrolled by an elite that operates across borders.
Just as the Nazis thrived in an era of economic instability, the contemporary far-right is building a base in areas disproportionately impacted by deindustrialisation and deprivation.
Tackling the threat they pose requires a credible counter-narrative, one centred on building working-class unity and tackling the deprivation and despair that the far-right feeds off. Crucial to that task is exposing a fundamental flaw in the far-right’s anti-elite narrative — they themselves are the elite.
Taj Ali is a journalist and historian. His work has appeared in the Huffington Post, Metro and the Independent. He is the former editor of Tribune Magazine and is currently writing a book on the history of British South Asian political activism in the UK.
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