European leaders are nonetheless hopeful that they will forge a working relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump. However they’re alarmed concerning the new administration’s X issue: the president’s billionaire backer and shut ally, Elon Musk.
And they’re more and more satisfied that they should counter Mr. Musk’s efforts to advertise a Trump-style overhaul of European politics.
Their rapid concern is his use of the social media platform he owns – X, previously Twitter – to again far-right politicians, particularly in Germany, which goes to the polls subsequent month.
Why We Wrote This
Elon Musk is making himself unpopular amongst mainstream European politicians by overtly supporting their excessive right-wing rivals. His social media platform, X, is beneath investigation by EU officers for potential bias.
But additionally they harbor two deeper, longer-term worries.
The primary is that his barbed interventions may sign the full-scale arrival in Europe of the type of on-line venom, misinformation, and conspiracy theories – and the offended polarization – which have poisoned American politics.
The second is that with Mr. Trump’s assist, X and different U.S. tech giants akin to Fb and Google may show wealthy and highly effective sufficient to evade or undermine the European Union’s groundbreaking Huge Tech rules. These legal guidelines constrain unsafe or incendiary on-line content material, and algorithms that might skew election campaigns.
Since Mr. Trump is unlikely to control the tech giants in America, that might give them free rein throughout the Western world.
The issue European leaders face is how to answer Mr. Musk. When his far-right cheerleading started, throughout anti-immigrant riots in Britain final yr, they had been reluctant to get right into a sparring match, for worry of undermining their efforts to construct bridges with Mr. Trump. That concern elevated when Mr. Trump received the U.S. election.
Now, nevertheless, the temper is altering. European leaders have begun to denounce Mr. Musk’s intervention in European politics.
And whereas the EU’s central govt our bodies nonetheless appear extra reticent, they, too, are exhibiting indicators of concern. Final week, the European Fee stepped up its investigation into X’s content-moderation instruments.
The primary signal of the shift got here when Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, responded to a collection of assaults from Mr. Musk by denouncing “lies and misinformation.”
But the principle catalyst has been Mr. Musk’s assist for the far-right Different for Germany get together, or AfD, forward of elections on Feb. 23.
With its hyperlinks to neo-Nazi teams, the AfD is on German intelligence businesses’ extremism watch record. But like different anti-immigration events in Europe, it has been gaining assist.
Polls counsel the center-right Christian Democratic Union is prone to lead the subsequent coalition authorities. However the AfD is anticipated to take second place, with round 20% of the vote, forward of the center-left Social Democrats whose ruling coalition collapsed final yr.
In addition to sharing pro-AfD messages along with his 215 million followers on X, Mr. Musk hosted a livestreamed dialogue with the get together’s chief. “I’m actually strongly recommending that individuals vote for AfD,” he mentioned.
And final weekend, when he joined the get together’s marketing campaign launch by video hyperlink, he echoed far-right criticism of postwar Germany’s shows of penitence for its Nazi previous. “There may be an excessive amount of deal with previous guilt,” he mentioned.
A lot of European leaders now appear to have determined that sufficient is sufficient.
French President Emmanuel Macron has accused Mr. Musk of backing a “reactionary worldwide.” Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez denounced “the richest man on the planet” for “attacking our [EU] establishments, inciting hatred, and overtly calling for assist for the heirs of Nazism in Germany.” Norway’s prime minister mentioned it was “worrying” that somebody with such wealth and affect was intervening in European international locations’ home politics.
The strongest rebuke has come from Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, after Mr. Musk’s remarks on the AfD launch. “The phrases we heard … about the necessity to overlook guilt for Nazi crimes sounded all too acquainted and ominous,” he mentioned, particularly simply days earlier than the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi loss of life camp.
Whereas far-right supporters are embracing Mr. Musk’s interventions, Europe’s mainstream leaders will take coronary heart from indicators that almost all Europeans appear firmly against them. A current ballot in Britain and Germany discovered that greater than two-thirds of respondents felt they had been unacceptable.
Nonetheless, the EU has develop into involved that algorithms utilized by X and different social media websites may skew content material in favor of a single political narrative and thus affect election outcomes.
The European Union’s means to implement its guidelines towards such conduct might rely much less on Mr. Musk than on his patron within the Oval Workplace.
To date, President Trump has professed to be unaware of Mr. Musk’s Euro-campaigning. He has even mentioned good issues about Keir Starmer, the left-of-center British chief whom Mr. Musk just lately referred to as “totally despicable.”
However by way of a video hyperlink final week with the World Financial Discussion board in Davos, Switzerland, the U.S. president complained concerning the hefty fines that the European Union has levied on Google, Apple, Meta, and different tech giants for violating EU antitrust or data-privacy safeguards.
“These are American firms,” he declared. “Whether or not you want them or not, [the EU] shouldn’t be doing that.”
