(Bloomberg) -- German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his deputy, Robert Habeck, used their New Year addresses to castigate Elon Musk over his backing for a far-right party in February’s snap election.
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Musk, a key adviser and major donor to US President-elect Donald Trump, has repeatedly praised the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany in recent weeks on his social media platform X. He expanded on his support for the party, known by its German acronym AfD, in an opinion piece published over the weekend by Welt am Sonntag newspaper.
Scholz, a center-left Social Democrat who Musk has regularly mocked, didn’t mention the South Africa-born entrepreneur by name but emphasized that the Feb. 23 ballot will be decided by German voters and not “by the owners of social media channels.”
“One can be forgiven for sometimes thinking that the more extreme an opinion is, the more attention it will garner,” Scholz said, according to the text of his address to be televised Tuesday evening.
“But it won’t be the person who yells loudest who will decide where Germany goes from here,” he added. “Rather, that will be up to the vast majority of reasonable and decent people.”
Habeck, who is running as the chancellor candidate for the Greens, accused Musk of seeking to weaken Europe as part of a bid to undermine regulations that impact his business empire.
“When Elon Musk — equipped not only with billions upon billions, but also with unbridled communication power — calls for the AfD to be elected in Germany, it is not out of ignorance of the AfD, it has logic and system,” Habeck said.
“A weak Europe is in the interests of those for whom regulation is an unreasonable limit to their power,” he added. “But there needs to be a limitation on power. No business model should be allowed to destroy our democracy.”
Scholz triggered the early election — seven months before the scheduled end of his four-year term — when he fired his finance minister in early November, effectively stripping himself of a majority in the lower house of parliament.
With less than two months until the vote, the main opposition conservatives under Friedrich Merz have a comfortable lead in opinion polls, with the AfD in second place and Scholz’s SPD party third.
Merz’s center-right CDU/CSU bloc has about 31% support, according to the latest Bloomberg polling average, with the AfD at around 20%, the SPD 17% and the Greens 12% in fourth.