For the last decade or more, Europe’s governments have been trying to resist covert influence operations from adversaries like Russia and China.
Now they have a very different challenge: Fending off overt efforts by Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s MAGA movement to seize territory, oust elected leaders and empower far-right causes and parties.
Even before he retakes office, Mr. Trump is making threats — perhaps serious, perhaps not — to acquire the territory of NATO allies like Canada and Denmark. And Mr. Musk, the president-elect’s biggest financial supporter, is using his social media platform X to bring the far-right Alternative for Germany party into the mainstream and smear the leaders of Britain’s center-left Labour Party.
It is not clear if Europe’s political immune system has the antibodies to defend against these new incursions.
This is not the first time a Trump ally has attempted to build a bridge with the European far right. In 2018 and 2019, the Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon held meetings with far-right politicians across Europe. But the political landscape now is very different. The governments of Germany and France have collapsed; far-right parties are on the rise in those countries, and are already in power in several others across the continent.
A senior official from the first Trump administration, who is in line for an even more senior role in the second, was blunt in his assessment: Europe, he said, has no idea what is coming its way.
‘A very rich person expressing his opinions’
Mr. Musk spent a $250 million slice of his $400 billion fortune to help Donald Trump get re-elected. He arguably had just as much influence on U.S. politics through his own notoriety and ownership of X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter.
He aggressively campaigned against Kamala Harris (in one case sharing a fake video of her describing herself as a “diversity hire” who does not “know the first thing about running the country”) and interviewed Trump live on the platform. He is now deploying a similar playbook in Europe.
In Britain, Mr. Musk revived a decade-old “grooming gangs” scandal that unfolded while Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose center-left Labour Party is in power, was head of public prosecutions.
Fanning the flames that were kindled by right-wing media outlets, Mr. Musk has called Mr. Starmer “utterly despicable” and says he should be “in prison.” Last week he asked his 212 million followers to vote on whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.”
According to British media reports, Mr. Musk is also considering a $100 million donation to Britain’s far-right Reform Party, which would be the country’s largest political donation ever. The party’s leader, Nigel Farage, one of the chief campaigners for Brexit, has met Trump several times, most recently at Mar-a-Lago last month.
“MAGA hates Starmer,” the former Trump administration official told The Times. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer his candid views while he is being considered for a role in the second Trump administration.
“MAGA loves Meloni,” he added, referring to Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, “as long as she meets her deportation targets.”
Mr. Musk’s SpaceX is also in talks with Ms. Meloni’s government to provide secure military communications through its Starlink satellite network. At a news conference last week, she described Mr. Musk as a “very rich person who is expressing his opinions.”
‘Musk is normalizing us’
In Germany, which is holding snap federal elections next month, Mr. Musk is encouraging voters to vote for the far-right AfD, offering it the legitimacy that has long been denied to a party under surveillance by Germany’s domestic intelligence service for its links to neo-Nazis.
In an opinion piece for a major German newspaper published Dec. 28, he called the AfD the last “spark of hope” for Germany. The country, he said, is “teetering on the brink of economic and cultural collapse.”
On Thursday he live-streamed a 75 minute conversation with Alice Weidel, the AfD’s candidate for chancellor, on X, giving her the same platform he gave Trump five months earlier.
Since Mr. Musk first endorsed the AfD in December, Ms. Weidel’s posts on X have routinely gone viral, in part because he reposts them, along with numerous neo-Nazi accounts have been reinstated and amplified. Researchers watching the online scene say far-right German influencers now post on X in English to get Mr. Musk’s attention.
Germans won’t vote for the AfD just because an American billionaire asks them to. But social media is a tool that can shift public opinion, taking ideas that were once considered extreme and inserting them into the mainstream over time.
What has kept the AfD out of power despite becoming the second most popular party in the country is a national taboo against working with the far right. The memory of Hitler, who formed a coalition with centrist conservatives, has so far kept this firewall in place.
“The firewall between the AfD and the White House is officially gone and that makes the German firewall look silly,” the AfD’s co-leader, Tino Chrupalla, told me. “Musk is normalizing us.”
Overt vs. Covert
U.S. influence campaigns in other countries are not new. During the Cold War America lent its support to friendly nations and parties and intervened — sometimes aggressively — in countries seen to be ideological adversaries.
But now the MAGA movement seems to be intentionally sowing discord within U.S. allies. That’s disorienting for Europeans who grew up imbibing American lessons about democracy after World War II.
“I can’t remember a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country in the history of the western democracies,” said Friedrich Merz, the leader and chancellor candidate of the center-right Christian Democrats. His party is leading in the polls but will need a coalition partner to form a government.
The United States remains the main guarantor of European security as the war in Ukraine has shown. It is also Europe’s biggest export market, making the prospect of tariffs a powerful threat for European economies. And Europe has no technology companies on par with those coming out of Silicon Valley, including Mr. Musk’s X platform and his Space X satellite company.
Europe’s dependency on Russian energy long hampered its response to the Kremlin’s meddling. But the dependency is much greater in the case of the United States.
Add to that the fact that the American interference is not covert, it is happening in broad daylight, which makes fighting back that much harder.
Exploiting existing grievances
Influence campaigns work best when they tap into existing grievances. As in the United States, Europe’s trust in institutions fell in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic. Voters have become more hostile toward immigration and more worried about the cost of living and the economy. There is a growing sense that centrist leaders on left and right have failed them on these issues.
Millions of people in Europe are angry with the establishment, said Matthew Goodwin, a conservative author and commentator. “It’s not being orchestrated by Trump or Musk.”
“Musk has not created the AfD,” Mr. Goodwin added. “It helps the AfD that he is getting them attention but the underlying driver of this are policy choices that were made over the past decade.”
Mr. Musk’s provocations in Europe may be designed for maximum chaos rather than electoral success. In Britain, he trashed Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right Reform Party, after Mr. Farage declined to endorse Mr. Musk’s demand that a far-right agitator be released from prison.
“Both the Kremlin and the forces around the libertarian-authoritarian camp around Musk want to sow chaos in Europe and get rid of the liberal democratic elites,” Thorsten Benner, director of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin, told the German outlet Die Zeit. “We have to arm ourselves against that. But the biggest danger for our democracies comes not from the outside but the inside. Those fighting election campaigns should focus on the problems that concern voters.”
Similar levels of infighting and chaos also exist within the broader MAGA movement. Back in United States, there are signs that those in Mr. Trump’s hard line anti-immigration inner circle are tiring of Mr. Musk, especially after a spat about whether the country should expand work visas for highly skilled immigrants. In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera on Sunday, Mr. Bannon called Mr. Musk “truly evil” and vowed to “take this guy down.”
Whatever the direct impact of American interference on Europe’s political map in coming years, Trump is determined to enforce his priorities in Europe whoever is in government.
“At the end of the day, Trump is going to be so much more aggressive with Europe in terms of advocating uncompromisingly for the U.S. position that it doesn’t actually matter who’s in charge,” the former Trump official said. “They key thing is America First. Everything else is a distraction. Trump is going to use American strength to get his way.”
