It literally sounds like the plot of a dystopian science fiction movie: The richest man in the world befriends—and helps finance—another rich man who becomes president of the United States, who then gives his plutocratic benefactor carte blanche access to the operations of the federal government. The bedlamite billionaire instantly zeroes in on the obscure little office that oversees the writing of all the government’s checks, thus ensuring that he has the power to bring down the U.S. and global economy and even, if he so wishes, topple said president.
Oh, and—he’s also a right-wing extremist who recently spoke to the far-right German political party whose leaders say things like “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.” He told them—with a wink-wink-nudge-nudge—that Germans placed “too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” And then there’s the matter of that salute, which of course, he denies was what many people—even or especially among those who delighted in it—thought it was.
What does Elon Musk want with control of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service and its computers that write the federal government’s checks? Maybe it’s benign. Maybe he and his team just want to scrutinize the hundreds of millions of payments the government makes to individuals, businesses, other governments, nonprofits, and so on and root out inefficiency.
It seems awfully unlikely that it’s benign. Musk tweeted over the weekend that the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has existed for six decades and spends billions on poverty relief, disaster aid, economic development, and more, is a “criminal organization.” But Musk’s motives aren’t even the main point here. The main point is that even if it is benign, it’s unprecedented and antidemocratic.
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Will Musk do to the federal government what he did to Twitter? The plundering of that platform was a crime, metaphorically, but at least it was (more or less) victimless. Here, there will be victims—immigrants, refugees, poor people, sick people, and many others who interfere with the schemes of the world’s richest man, who believes Germany should stop apologizing.
With only a few weeks until Germany’s election, Elon Musk has unambiguously thrown his support behind the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. In a video address to a party rally last week, he appeared to urge Germans to “move on” from any “past guilt” related to the Holocaust.
It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.
Troublingly, the AfD is now firmly entrenched as Germany’s second-most popular political party, behind the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Like all parties in German elections, however, it cannot win an outright majority. It is also unlikely to be invited to join any ruling coalition that emerges from the February 23 election.
But the AfD’s anti-migrant, anti-government sloganeering has already seriously distorted Germany’s public debate and democratic culture, leaving many to ask whether it even needs to win elections to see its policies implemented.
This was evident following a dramatic week in Germany’s Bundestag.
First, in a radical break with Germany’s political norms, opposition leader Friedrich Merz deliberately drew on the votes of the AfD on Wednesday to ram a radical anti-asylum seeker motion through the parliament.
It was the first time in the history of the Bundestag that a parliamentary majority was reached with the help of the far right. Merz’s action was widely condemned as a “taboo-breaking” step towards legitimising the AfD.
The so-called ‘firewall’ was broken this week between mainstream German political parties and the far right. Clemens Bilan/EPA
Merz tried to take this a step further with a far-reaching bill to tighten immigration controls on Friday. Although the bill narrowly failed, all of the AfD voted with Merz. Twelve members of his own CDU party refused to back him.
Merz’s courting of the far right is widely seen as politically unnecessary, given his conservative CDU is already leading the national polls, making him the favourite to succeed the Social Democratic Party (SDP)‘s Olaf Scholz as chancellor.
This raises a couple crucial questions heading into the election. Is it insiders or outsiders that are playing the biggest role in bringing the far right into the mainstream? And just how big a role will the AfD play after the election?
The Musk effect
Musk’s embrace of the AfD should come as no surprise, given the integral part he played in Donald Trump’s election victory in the United States. In the German context, however, his behaviour and statements have taken on darker hues.
Germans know only too well what is at stake when democracy is eroded by those who abuse its freedoms to attack it. Had Musk’s now notorious Nazi salutes following Trump’s inauguration been performed in Berlin, for example, he might have faced up to three years in prison.
The catchphrase “never again” has underpinned German politics since the second world war. Yet, the response to Musk’s recent provocations was oddly muted in some sections of the German media.
With a few notable exceptions, it was left to activists to remind Germans of the severity of this gesture – projecting an image of Musk’s salute on a German Tesla plant, alongside the word “heil”.
Given the seriousness with which Germany patrols representations of its Nazi past, it was surprising just how few journalists were prepared to state without equivocation that “a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute”.
Merz’s embrace of the far right
Initially, there were some signs Germany’s main political leaders would decry Musk’s attempts to normalise far-right politics in the country.
Scholz has continued to label Musk’s blatant attempts to influence German politics as “unacceptable” and “disgusting”.
Merz claims to be keeping his distance from Musk. But it appears his strategy for winning the election is not far from what Musk is suggesting – mimicking AfD policies and collaborating with the party on anti-immigration votes.
In his most radical break with the centrism that characterised the CDU under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, Merz cracked the “firewall” against working with the far-right this week. Knowing just what it meant, he used the AfD’s support to pass the starkly worded nationalist border protection motion in the Bundestag.
Democratic party leaders, meanwhile, registered their shock and dismay. Merkel herself spoke out against Merz, saying it was “wrong” to “knowingly” work with the AfD.
Her intervention appears to have been critical to the immigration bill failing on Friday, with many of her former supporters in the CDU withholding their votes.
A defaced election poster for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) showing leader Friedrich Merz smeared with a Hitler moustache. Martin Meissner/AP
What AfD’s rise could mean
Given the two votes in the past week and Musk’s high-profile intervention, many in Germany now fear a CDU victory in the election could signal more collaboration with the AfD.
The Greens’ Robert Habeck, Germany’s vice chancellor, has said Merz’s nationalist coalition would “destroy Europe”. He has also warned Musk to keep his “hands off our democracy”, prompting Musk to label Habeck “a traitor to the German people”.
People attend the election campaign launch of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party on Jan. 25. Hannibal Hanschke/EPA
Musk is by no means the cause of the AfD’s popularity, but his embrace of the extremist party has given it a global profile and credibility in circles that might not have otherwise considered supporting it.
As some commentators have suggested, it is probably not coincidental the AfD’s plans for the German economy would benefit Musk’s business interests. Economic self-interest alone seems insufficient, however, to explain why Musk has gravitated to the extreme right.
The same might be said of Merz. Electoral calculations alone cannot explain his risky courting of the far right. He has long been the frontrunner to win the next election. Cosying up to the AfD will only make it harder to form a coalition with either Scholz’s Social Democratic Party or the Greens.
If these two parties refuse to deal with Merz, the only other bloc large enough to deliver his party control of the government would be the AfD. Would he go so far?
Whether it is formally part of the next government or not, the AfD and its camp followers (such as Musk) could be set to have a much bigger influence on German politics. How this will change Germany in the long term remains to be seen.
Donald Trump signs executive orders at the White House on Thursday. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, announces tit-for-tat 25% tariffs and warns of impeded access to ‘vital goods critical to US security’
The leaders of Canada and Mexico have hit back after Donald Trump signed an order authorizing drastic tariffs of up to 25% on their exports to the US, while China said it would complain to the World Trade Organization after it was also targeted by the president.
Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, on Saturday night made a televised address announcing concrete measures including a tit-for-tat 25% tariff phased in across C$155bn ($107bn) worth of American products. Trudeau said Trump had put at risk US consumers’ and industries’ access to much-needed Canadian critical minerals and resources including oil, energy and timber. The prime minister promised to work with Canada’s provinces to review dealings with the United States.
Addressing Americans, Trudeau said: “Tariffs against Canada will put your jobs at risk, potentially shutting down American auto assembly plants and other manufacturing facilities. They will raise costs for you including food at the grocery store and gas at the pump. They will impede your access to an affordable supply of vital goods crucial for US security such as nickel, potash, uranium, steel and aluminum.”
Trudeau added: “They will violate the free trade agreement that the president and I along with our Mexican partner negotiated and signed a few years ago” – referring to the United States Mexico Canada agreement (USMCA) that was drawn up largely at Trump’s behest after he tore up the previous North America free trade agreement (Nafta) during his first term as US president.
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Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Environmentalists and locals have resisted a third runway at London’s Heathrow, Europe’s busiest airport, for more than two decades. Today, their efforts took a major setback.
The UK government has announced it will give the green light to airport expansion. This is not guaranteed to increase growth in the national economy as Chancellor Rachel Reeves hopes. More flights and more emissions are certain, however, at a time when experts are practically screaming at governments to rein them in.
“No airport expansions should proceed” without a UK-wide plan to annually assess and control the sector’s climate impact said the government’s watchdog, the Climate Change Committee, in 2023. Aeroplanes are 8% of UK emissions and 2% of the world’s, but they also release gases that seed heat-trapping clouds in the upper atmosphere, which triples air travel’s greenhouse effect.
While the government’s own advisers have effectively ruled out new runways for the sake of net zero, airport and airline bosses play a different tune. So what does the sector propose to manage its own pollution?
Not enough cooking oil to save us
Aviation is a notoriously difficult sector to decarbonise says Richard Sulley, a senior research fellow in sustainability policy at the University of Sheffield: “If electric or hydrogen-powered planes are possible, it won’t be for many years yet.”
To justify air travel emissions ballooning in the meantime, the aviation sector has promised a mix of “supply-side” measures, like replacing kerosene with so-called “sustainable aviation fuel” (SAF), which Reeves described as “a game changer”, and making planes lighter and more fuel-efficient.
Efficiency, in this context, is a slippery path to decarbonisation. When a high-emitting activity is reformed so that it consumes less energy, the efficiency savings are generally eclipsed by the increasing demand it drives.
“Indeed, the sector’s own plans for growth will outstrip efforts to decarbonise through synthetic fuel, delivering a neutral effect at best,” Sulley says.
“Demand-side” measures like fewer flights, taxes on frequent flying and domestic flight bans (see France) could cut emissions, he notes, but are seldom mentioned.
The UK has set a target for airline fuel to be 10% SAF by 2030. So far we’re at 1.2% – and Sulley reports that the industry has not said how it will scale up in time.
Even if airlines start taking their commitment to SAF seriously very soon, it’s a dubious solution to aviation’s climate impact according to political economists Gareth Dale (Brunel University) and Josh Moos (Leeds Beckett University).
Earlier SAF test flights burned coconut oil – 3 million coconuts to power a journey from London to Amsterdam, as Dale and Moos calculate it. At that rate, they argue Heathrow would exhaust the world’s entire crop in a few weeks (there are 18,000 commercial airports worldwide).
Modern SAF is blended with waste products from farms and kitchens. But the pair argue that the market for used cooking oil is “notoriously unregulated”. SAF may in fact be relabelled palm oil from plantations that are erasing orangutan habitat in the tropics. Again, Dale and Moos argue there is not enough used cooking oil to meet existing, let alone future, demand.
Transport for the rich, by the rich
At least the hype around SAF addresses the main problem, albeit misleadingly. Policy experts David Howarth (University of Essex) and Steven Griggs (De Montfort University) marvel at how often “carbon-neutral airports” in aviation sustainability strategies simply mean terminals powered by renewable energy.
“A terminal’s heating or lighting is, of course, largely irrelevant when its core business is as emissions-intensive as flying,” says Sulley.
Unfortunately for Rachel Reeves, a 2023 report by the New Economics Foundation found that any economic benefits of airport expansion will be largely confined to the airports themselves. Meanwhile, a wealthy subset of UK society can be expected to capture the biggest share of any new flight capacity. Each year, around half of British residents do not fly at all, Sulley points out.
At the stratospheric heights of that subset are the private jet passengers who are served by “more or less dedicated airports” that are more obscure to the general public, says Raymond Woessner, a geographer at Sorbonne Université. A study published in November found that emissions from these flights rose by 46% between 2019 and 2023. The lead author described wealthy passengers using jets “like taxis”.
“Discretion and anonymity” is what one airport nestled in the Oxfordshire countryside promises for “routine celebrity, head of state and royal visits”. Without state direction or regulation, it is these people who are setting the agenda for air travel.
Woessner notes that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, successfully lobbied to derail a high-speed rail project in California in 2013. Instead of an option that has shown its ability to cut flight demand, the US will be offered intercontinental rocket travel.
Musk’s company SpaceX says that rockets could ferry passengers between New York and Shanghai in under an hour. Rockets would burn “vastly more fuel per trip than conventional aircraft”, says aerospace engineer Angadh Nanjangud of Queen Mary University of London, but this might “drive critical research into carbon-neutral” methane-based rocket fuel.
It would not be the first time an industry seeking to grow has used an as yet fantastical fuel to justify more carbon in Earth’s atmosphere.
“There is the potential to create a good life for all within planetary boundaries,” say Dale and Moos.
“But getting there requires clipping the wings of the aviation industry.”
Protesters hold up a banner reading “NO” with the O shaped like an Adolf Hitler caricature during a demonstration against right-wing extremism, U.S. President Donald Trump, and right-wing billionaire Elon Musk on January 25, 2025 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo: Omer Messinger/Getty Images)
“We must not forget the tragic lesson of our past,” said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. “Evil, violence and contempt cannot triumph anew.”
Billionaire enterpreneur Elon Muskinsisted at a far-right rally in Germany over the weekend that the European country must move “beyond the past” and leave behind the memory of one of the deadliest genocides in history—but as leaders on the continent marked the 80th anniversary of the Auschwitz concentration camp liberation on Monday, several made clear that Musk’s advice was not welcome.
Musk’s comments on “‘the need to forget German guilt for Nazi crimes’ sounded all too familiar and ominous,” said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Sunday. “Especially only hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on the social media platform X, “I couldn’t agree more.”
The country’s ambassador to Israel said that while Musk claimed German children are treated as “guilty of the sins” of the Nazis during World War II, the government simply wants “them to grow up informed and responsible and to apply the lessons of Germany’s past.”
As Common Dreams reported, the Tesla CEO and key adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump made the remarks at a rally for Alternative for Germany (AfD) on Saturday, five weeks before Germans are set to vote in federal elections.
AfD is currently polling at 19%, trailing the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which is in first place at 28%. But leaders across Europe, including Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Scholz have warned that Musk appears to be angling for the spread of far-right ideologies—including neo-Nazism—in European countries.
The AfD has been designated a “suspected extremist” group by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, and one of its candidates for public office last year said that “not all” Nazis who worked for Adolf Hitler’s government were criminals.
The party has been ostracized in Germany, with other political groups including the CDU ruling out the formation of a coalition government with the AfD, but last week CDU leader Friedrich Merz said he would push for tougher anti-immigration proposals even if they were submitted by the AfD.
Scholz, who represents the Social Democrats, toldStuttgarter Zeitung in response to Merz’s comments that “the firewall to the AfD must not crumble.”
As Tusk oversaw the liberation of Auschwitz anniversary on Monday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, he alluded to Musk’s comments at the AfD rally.
“We must not forget the tragic lesson of our past,” he said on X, which is owned by Musk. “Evil, violence, and contempt cannot triumph anew.”
Musk’s comments came days after he appeared to flash a Nazi salute twice at an event for Trump’s inauguration.
In the U.S. on Sunday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker addressed Musk’s remarks at the AfD rally on CNN, asking why Trump hadn’t spoken out against them.
“President Trump ought to be calling that out,” said the Democratic governor. “If he doesn’t agree with Elon Musk, if he doesn’t agree with two Sieg Heils at his own rally, and backing a party that backs Nazis, then he ought to say so. Why isn’t Donald Trump speaking out?”
