Imagine a politician fighting a general election being granted the opportunity of a publicly livestreamed chat with one of the most powerful figures in the world, only to be heard wriggling out of it after 70 minutes. “I don’t know what to continue (with),” Alice Weidel said to Elon Musk, in effect shutting down the unique audience the owner of X had gifted the AfD leader on Thursday evening.
Admittedly, the rambling conversation felt longer than 70 minutes. It missed moderation and while Musk and Weidel giggled a lot and agreed on almost every issue, the sense that they were boring each other became increasingly acute as they droned on about space travel and religious belief rather than the alleged decline of western civilisation. Had Adolf Hitler not been mentioned, the highly anticipated live talk would have been shocking only for being so unnewsworthy.
Yes, Musk once again openly voiced his support for the far-right AfD in the forthcoming federal elections on 23 February. And the German authorities have yet to determine whether this broadcast was a case of unfair and illegal party support during an election campaign.
The majority verdict in Germany seems to be that Weidel embarrassed herself and damaged the party’s chances. I would argue that this is not the case. At worst, it was a missed chance for Weidel.
Some mocked her for her English. One TikTok user said she had “English like Lothar Matthäus”. Matthäus, once a national hero and the best footballer in the world, became a laughing stock when a late-career move to a team in New York in 2000 revealed his poor English.
But ultimately, being ridiculed by the mainstream political commentariat does not change the trajectory the AfD is on as it seeks to double its representation in the German parliament. And the platform from which the AfD challenges German democracy is ever-growing.
Most of what Weidel said was not new – not for German audiences at least. Much of it was downright misleading: she got in a lot of misinformation. She told Musk, for example, that Angela Merkel had opened Germany’s borders to Syrian migrants in 2015, when in reality Merkel simply opted not to close them. Weidel claimed that Germany is the only industrial country phasing out nuclear power, when Austria, Spain and – until recently – Italy have done so too or are aiming to. She framed the AfD as a “conservative and libertarian party”, although it indeed has, according to German intelligence, various ties to rightwing extremism and its ideas.
Usually, when pressed by the Germany media about alleged neo-Nazi connections, Weidel turns ice-cold or bursts out laughing to frame the accusations as ridiculous.
Weidel laughed again (there was a lot of laughing) when, after Musk brought up the subject of the AfD being unfairly tarred with the Nazi brush, she gave a lecture about how Hitler was in fact a “communist” and how the late National Socialist Führer was only labelled “rightwing” in order to defame modern“conservatives”. Weidel’s resurrection of this old trope of the German far right, which has been debunked many times, drew widespread derision as an own goal, from political commentators and her political opponents.
Perhaps from an international perspective, you have lost the argument if you are distancing yourself from Hitler, but this discourse is not unusual for an AfD figure. The party has a long history of similar historical provocations. The party grandee Alexander Gauland once said: “Hitler and the Nazis are just bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.” Björn Höcke, a rightwing extremist and influential AfD leader from the region of Thuringia, has called for a “180-degree change” in Germany’s official policy of coming to terms with the past. He also once said “the big problem is that one presents Hitler as absolutely evil”.
While it doesn’t look as if similar claims are explicitly making their way into the AfD’s manifesto for the elections on 23 February, the party has developed a certain kind of resilience to the public outcry that naturally follows their public utterance. The party cracked down when Maximilian Krah, lead candidate for the European elections, said that the SS, the Nazis’ main paramilitary force, were “not all criminals”. He was removed; Weidel is widely believed to have been behind the decision.
But two things have to be considered. On her way to the top of the AfD, Weidel has formed alliances with people such as Gauland and Höcke. This suggests that she tacitly approves of the direction they promote for the movement. While calling Hitler a “communist” might have been purely opportunistic rather than ideologically motivated, it was not Weidel’s first foray into historical revisionism.
In 2023, she called the anniversary of the end of the second world war in Germany a “day of defeat for (my) own country” which she would not want to “celebrate with a former occupying force”. In a 2024 interview, Weidel said she refused to look up the new name of the Polish town in which one of her grandfathers was born. Głubczyce was back then part of German Silesia.
So far, none of this has damaged Weidel’s reputation – indeed, revisionist talk helps create diversions. And all but one poll published this week saw the AfD gain more support. Standing at between 18 and 21.5%, the AfD is trailing its historic peak from a year ago – although this time, the momentum comes with only weeks to go until the federal election.
With the ongoing public debate around migration, the aftermath of the pandemic, the Russian war in Ukraine and Germany’s wobbly economy, the AfD has become more successful in reaching out to demographics it historically performed badly with: women, younger voters and people with higher education. Many of them have shown they are prepared to ignore a long list of AfD scandals, from allegations about spying for China to the party’s plan to push out migrants in vast numbers.
One off-key chat between Weidel and Musk is probably unlikely to deter anyone who thinks the AfD’s solutions are what Germany needs. If, indeed, they considered it off-key at all.
This weekend will see Weidel officially confirmed as the AfD’s first ever “chancellor candidate” at a party meeting in Riesa. In terms of her position in the party, Weidel is safe for now. She might have missed an extraordinary chance to build on the party’s momentum as she flirted with Trump’s billionaire close ally. But – and this is a bitter truth for the many who fear the AfD as a threat to German democracy – it looks a very long way from collapsing.
Thomas Vorreyer is a Berlin-based journalist with a focus on East German politics
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