The richest man in the world is backing far-right parties against a political establishment that has failed to deliver.
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.