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His comments to the hard-right Alternative for Germany party escalated efforts by the billionaire to influence the country’s election for chancellor next month.
Jan. 27, 2025, 11:42 a.m. ET
Elon Musk told a gathering of the hard-right Alternative for Germany party this weekend that the country has “too much of a focus on past guilt,” an apparent effort to wipe away the long shadow of the Nazis that has influenced generations of Germans to quarantine extreme political parties from public life.
“It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything” Mr. Musk said in a short video that was broadcast to thousands of party members in the eastern city of Halle.
“We don’t want everything to be the same everywhere where it’s just one big sort of soup,” Mr. Musk said. “You know, we want to have something where it’s, you go to different countries and you experience a different culture and it is unique and special and good and — that the German government takes actions to protect its citizens and makes sure that it seeks the health and well-being of the German people.”
Mr. Musk’s comments came on Saturday, two days before official ceremonies in Poland commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, one of the most significant days of memorial on the German calendar. His critics in Germany sharply criticized his words and his timing.
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“The enthusiasm of the native South African Elon Musk for German right-wing radicals, for German pride, German people and German hand signals is remarkable,” the journalist Mathieu von Rohr wrote sarcastically in Spiegel, one of Germany’s most important newsmagazines.
