MAGA, the German Far Right, and the Transnational Assault on Democracy

A reflection on the German far right, Elon Musk’s interference in the German election, and why the MAGA-AfD alliance isn’t nearly as irresistible as they want us to believe

Elon Musk sending a video message to an AfD rally in January – credit: AFP

The results of the German election are in. The glass-half-full interpretation: In an election with record turnout of 82.5 percent, about three quarters of the voting public stuck with parties that undoubtedly support some version of liberal democracy and the constitutional order. Friedrich Merz, the leader of the conservative CDU, which emerged as the strongest party with 28.6 percent of the vote, will likely become chancellor as the leader of a two-party coalition with the Social Democrats. Merz immediately and forcefully rejected the idea of cooperating with the far-right AfD (“Alternative für Deutschland”).

The glass half-empty interpretation: The AfD came in second with 20.8 percent of the vote. It is by far the strongest result the far right has achieved in Germany since the fall of the Nazi regime. In east Germany, the AfD dominated almost everywhere, getting close to 50 percent of the vote in some areas of the former GDR. The expected coalition between the Conservatives and the Social Democrats should be relatively stable – but if previous iterations of that constellation in the twenty-first century are any indication, it might also be too ponderous to change the pervasive perception that the system is stale. The AfD is counting on it: Its leading candidate Alice Weidel is already talking about the next election in 2029 – the far right is smelling blood.

A key question going into the election was whether the aggressive endorsement from MAGA forces would further boost the AfD’s chances? That was certainly the intention on the American Right. In fact, Elon Musk, the AfD’s most prominent and most aggressive MAGA supporter, first declared on Ex-Twitter on December 20 that “Only the AfD can save Germany.” On December 28, Musk elaborated his position in an op-ed for the German newspaper Die Welt – something like the equivalent of the Wall Street Journal, complete with a WSJ-style reactionary, hard-right opinion section. The AfD, Musk declared, “represents the last vestige of hope for this nation.” On January 9, Musk hosted a 85-minute live conversation on Ex-Twitter with AfD leader Alice Weidel (a lot more on that remarkable event below); on January 25, finally, Musk appeared via video message at an AfD campaign event and told the adoring crowd of German rightwing radicals and extremists that “It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.” Oh, and he had an opinion on how Germany should handle the legacy of the Nazi past and the Holocaust as well: “There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” Well then.

Courting the AfD is also officially the position of the new U.S. government. The Trumpists have left no doubt where their loyalties lie. At the Munich Security Conference ten days ago, JD Vance made the assembled transatlantic diplomatic elite stare into the ugly face of Trumpism. The vice president was not interested in talking about what Europe might expect from this administration regarding the war in Ukraine. The real threat for Europe, Vance declared, was not coming from Russia, or any other autocratic regime – it was coming “from within.” The democratic parties in Europe are the real authoritarians, and the authoritarians working to destroy liberal democracy from both within and without are the real democrats: That’s the bizarro world as Vance sees it. He bemoaned the lack of “free speech” in Europe (for rightwing extremists both domestically as well as those who want to interfere from the outside like Elon Musk), the supposed assault on religious freedom (for Christian fundamentalists); he attacked Europe’s political leaders for allowing their countries, as Vance suggested, to be overrun by dangerous immigrants and for suppressing the real will of the people, for upholding a “firewall” against far-right parties that, in Vance’s interpretation, represent the righteous anger of the Volk.

Even though he didn’t mention the AfD by name, that last point, about the “firewalls,” was directed specifically at Germany. Those “firewalls” against cooperating with far-right parties have basically fallen everywhere else in Europe – Germany’s mainstream parties are now the exception in upholding it. And to eliminate all potential doubt about where the allegiance of the Trumpist regime lies, he afterwards went to meet with Alice Weidel, the AfD’s candidate for chancellor: The most senior U.S. official to ever sit down with the German far right.

The level of shock and terror in response to Vance’s speech and his meeting with the leader of the AfD tells us something important about Europe’s political and diplomatic elites: A far-right politician told the Europeans he doesn’t like liberal democracy and prefers European far-right parties – that comes as a surprise only if one hadn’t fully grasped that the U.S. government is now indeed in the hands of a far-right regime.

Even if Vance’s speech and behavior weren’t all that surprising: There certainly is cause for concern. America is aligning with the autocrats and openly siding against its nominal liberal democratic allies. MAGA’s leaders are all in on pushing the AfD. This has sparked quite a bit of consternation and fear in the face of this transnational rightwing assault on liberal democracy: Who can stand against such interference fueled by the government of the most powerful nation on earth and the unimaginable wealth of Elon Musk?

Alright, let’s take a deep breath.

Instead of merely indulging in the sense of dread resulting from the MAGA-AfD alliance, I want to offer three things: First, I will outline a kind of primer on the AfD that hopefully answers some of the most pressing questions about the German far right; secondly, I want to reflect on what we can learn from the relationship between MAGA and the AfD – does it tell us anything we don’t already know about the ideology and political project of the far right on either side of the Atlantic? Finally, let’s think through what this transnational far-right alliance has actually amounted to: Musk and Weidel certainly want us to believe they represent an irresistible uprising of the will of the people. I say we must not fall for it.

The electoral history of the AfD

In November, German chancellor Olaf Scholz decided to force a snap election because the governing coalition between his social-democratic SPD, the free-market, center-right FDP, and the left-progressive Green Party was no longer functional. Since then, the polls had very consistently suggested the AfD would emerge as the second-strongest party nationally.

The Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) was founded in February 2013. In the federal election in the fall of that same year, the AfD narrowly failed to clear the 5-percent hurdle that is intended to keep the parliament from splintering into too many small factions. But the party initially remained on a relatively steady upward trajectory: 7.1 percent in the European parliamentary elections in the spring of 2014; around 10 percent in several state elections in east Germany in the fall of 2014; 12.6 percent in the next federal election in 2017.

At that point, the narrative of a “rise of the far right” or “rise of rightwing populism” across Europe was well established. To the extent it suggested an inevitable linear progression, it was somewhat misleading. In the 2021 federal election, the AfD stalled at 10.3 percent. Overall, however, the party not only consolidated and sustained support, but grew into a regional powerhouse especially in east Germany. In June 2024, the AfD got 16 percent nationwide in the European Parliament election and was the strongest party almost everywhere in the east. In the fall of last year, the AfD achieved unprecedented results in several eastern German state elections: In Thuringia, it emerged as easily the strongest party with 32.8 percent of the vote compared to just 23.6 percent for the second-placed CDU; it came in second and got very close to being the strongest party in both Saxony (30.6 percent) and Brandenburg (29.2 percent).

What these raw numbers can’t tell is the story of the AfD’s fairly dramatic ideological radicalization. It first appeared on the political scene in 2013 as a party somewhere between mainstream and more reactionary, nationalist conservatism, while more radical or even extremist voices and factions were mostly confined to the margins. But within just a few years, the AfD had evolved into what it is now: A far-right party that fully rejects liberal democracy and is undoubtedly the political home of Germany’s rightwing extremists.

Far right – radical right – extreme right

I want to pause for a moment and reflect a little bit on the terms that are popularly used to label rightwing parties in the academic, political, as well as broader public discourses. Far right, rightwing populism, radical right, rightwing extremism… there is no universally agreed upon definition of what, exactly, we mean by these terms – certainly not in the way they are used colloquially, and not among academic observers either. As a result, they are often used synonymously.

Political scientist Cas Mudde has suggested a classification I find particularly helpful, especially when it comes to determining what, exactly, we are confronted with in case of the AfD. Mudde has been at the forefront of the research on far-right parties and movement across Europe – few people can offer the kind of broad, comparative perspective he can provide. In his 2019 book The Far Right Today, Mudde concisely outlines what I believe is an extremely useful typology.

The first key distinction to draw is between the mainstream right and the far right. On the mainstream right, we find established conservative parties that are largely on board with the foundations of liberal democracy: the rule of law, universal suffrage, free and fair elections, minority rights, protection of baseline civil liberties. What defines them as parties of the right is that they are skeptical towards the idea of egalitarianism; they accept “natural” hierarchies which they contend should either be preserved or, at least, not leveled via state intervention. But they tolerate some measure of pluralism, respect democratic deliberation, and ultimately support and stabilize the democratic system.

Far-right movements and parties, by contrast, reject the system – they are fundamentally not on board with liberal democracy. Crucially, the far right is itself not a monolithic bloc but covers a range of ideologies as well as attitudes and dispositions. Cas Mudde helpfully distinguishes two main camps on the far right: the radical right and the extreme right. The distinction really comes down to a reactionary (on the radical right) vs revolutionary (on the extreme right) attitude and political project. The radical-right reactionaries disdain liberal democracy, but prefer to work mostly within the existing political and constitutional system to turn the clock back; they begrudgingly accept some level of restraint in their anti-democratic pursuit. If they got their way, they would probably erect something that is best described as an illiberal democracy: It still looks democratic on the surface, with elections and opposition parties, but the system is set up to entrench certain hierarchies, discriminate against historically marginalized groups, and consolidate power in the hands of the right. To me, Chief Justice John Roberts belongs in that bucket (and has a case to be one of their standard-bearers in the United States).

The extreme-right revolutionaries, on the other hand, will never be satisfied with just reformist reactionary measures. They desire to tear the system down. They accept no opposition, no restraint. They are not content to bend the law, they believe they stand above it. They don’t just want to make it harder for certain groups to participate in the political process, they want to purge them from the nation.

The point of this kind of terminological and conceptual exercise is not to establish a rigid nomenclature. That would be counter-productive, as the boundaries between these different factions are not static: they are fluid and constantly contested. The key takeaway is that the right doesn’t exist as a monolith, and there are important distinctions to be drawn especially regarding the right’s relationship with liberal democracy.

Applying such a typology to today’s Republicans, it is clear that the GOP is not a mainstream, but a far-right party. Since the 1950s, it has developed from an ideologically heterogeneous big-tent party to, first, a party of the mainstream right and then to what it is today: Devoted to an extremist leader who presides over a far-right coalition that unites different shades of radical reaction and “counter-revolutionary” extremism.

The AfD spans a very similar ideological and political spectrum.

The ideological trajectory of the AfD since 2013

When the AfD was founded in the spring of 2013, it initially had several wings ranging from moderate to extreme. The more moderate wing was dominated by conservative, market-fundamentalist economics professors fueled by “Euroskepticism”: They rejected the European monetary union and weren’t exactly big fans of the EU in general. There was, secondly, a national-conservative, reactionary wing, more focused on social and cultural issues and especially immigration. And finally, extremist voices were present from the start, although mostly confined to the margins.

In the summer of 2015, the party split. The economics professors and Euroskeptics were disempowered, many left the AfD; the moderate wing quickly withered. The reactionary national conservatives took over. The split happened before the Syrian refugee crisis peaked in the fall of 2015. But the AfD’s transformation into a proper far-right party was certainly sped up by these events. Henceforth, it was defined by anti-Muslim sentiment, an escalating anti-immigration stance and an aggressive ethno-nationalism; it also increasingly focused on raging against any and all social and cultural progress of recent decades. The feminists, the environmentalists, the lefty students, the lgbtq+ community – they were all added to the AfD’s enemy list.

A few impressions capturing the AfD’s trajectory since 2015:

The leading figure of the extremist wing of the party, with strong ties to the neo-Nazi scene, is Björn Höcke. He leads the AfD in the state of Thuringia, its strongest bastion in the country. In 2017 Höcke called the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a “memorial of shame.” In May 2021, he yelled “Everything for Germany!” (“Alles für Deutschland!”) at a party rally. This slogan is associated with Nazi stormtroopers. Höcke, of course, claims he did not know that. Which hasn’t kept him from repeatedly playing around with this kind of Nazi rhetoric: At a rally in December 2023, he said “Everything for…” – leaving it to the audience to finish: “Germany!” In May 2024, a court found that Höcke was indeed guilty of using a prohibited Nazi slogan; he was fined.

In May 2021, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz – BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, designated the AfD as a “suspected extremist case” and consequently placed the party under surveillance. The AfD challenged this decision, but it was upheld in court. In May 2024, the judges at the Higher Administrative Court in Münster declared they were “convinced that there are sufficient factual indications that the AfD is pursuing efforts that are directed against the human dignity of certain groups of people and against the principle of democracy.”

In April 2023, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution designated the youth wing of the AfD, the so-called “Young Alternative” (Junge Alternative), as “certified right-wing extremist” (rather than just “suspected”). This designation was also challenged and upheld in court. In January, the party finally reacted by deciding to replace the “Young Alternative” with a new youth group. However, in keeping with the regular AfD playbook, the party hasn’t actually shown any interest in critically examining why it attracted a bunch of young extremists. The “Young Alternative” produced a lot of negative press right before the federal election, and so the party officially cut ties. A little bit of window dressing.

In November 2023, several high-ranking AfD politicians attended a meeting with neo-Nazis and rightwing business people in Potsdam to discuss a plan envisioning the ethnic cleansing of Germany via the forced deportation of millions of people. They euphemistically called it “remigration,” a term European rightwing extremists have widely adopted. When an investigative report alerted the public in January 2024, over a million people took to the streets to protest. Subsequent reporting revealed that this had in fact been the seventh such meeting. The whole plan hinged on the AfD coming to power in Germany.

In May 2024, the coalition of far-right parties in the European parliament, the so-called Identity and Democracy (ID) group, threw the AfD out. The ID was the home of France’s National Rally (that’s the party of Marine Le Pen) and Austria’s far-right FPÖ. Not exactly liberal democracy’s loyal allies – but they no longer wanted to tolerate the AfD in their midst. Why? Because the AfD’s lead candidate for the 2024 European parliamentary election, Maximilian Krah, publicly declared we shouldn’t be so quick to judge the actions of… members of the Waffen-SS, the military arm of the SS, which played a key role in the Nazi regime’s genocidal machine. In response, none other than Marine Le Pen declared that “it was urgent to establish a cordon sanitaire” and end all cooperation with the AfD; she demanded “a clean break with this movement.” Krah, of course, still represents the AfD as a member of the European Parliament.

To sum it all up: Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, classifies the AfD as a “suspected extremist group” and therefore surveils the party; in addition, the AfD regional branches in three of the sixteen German states have been classified as “confirmed right-wing extremist”; the same is true for the party’s youth organization. Ideologically, the AfD is an anti-system party. It wants Germany out of the European Union and align the country with Russia. The party is dominated by an aggressive ethno-nationalism and desires to purge foreigners from Germany. In November 2024, for instance, the AfD’s Bavarian branch adopted a “remigration resolution” demanding that millions of people be expelled. The AfD is undoubtedly the home of the German far right and the political arm of rightwing extremism in Germany.

Alice Weidel gets really mad when you mention what her party is

You know who thinks it’s totally unfair – mean leftist slander! – to call the AfD a far-right party? Its candidate for chancellor and co-leader Alice Weidel. “We are a conservative-libertarian party,” she told Elon Musk during their Ex-Twitter conversation in January. That’s her mantra. And it’s complete nonsense.

Weidel loves to project a “respectable” image. She cultivates the habitus of Germany’s entrenched wealthy elite, complete with pearl necklace and pantsuit. In her attempt to fight off the “far right” label, her identity is her trump card. Weidel is an economist who worked as a Goldman Sachs analyst. She lived in China for several years; she is married to a Sri-Lankan born Swiss woman. For Elon Musk, that’s all the proof anyone could want. In his Welt op-ed, he wrote: “The description of AfD as far-right is made obviously false simply by noting that Alice Weidel, the party leader has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Please.”

Weidel has her own way of reconciling her private life with the fact that she leads a party that is defined by its disdain for “gender ideology” almost as much as by its islamophobia: “I am not queer. I am just married to a woman who I have known for 20 years,” she said in 2023. And that’s also how she is seen by her own party. In a Financial Times profile published in January, a high-ranking AfD official is quoted as saying: “She is just gay by biology but not by political conviction.” As bizarre as that may sound, it’s really spot on: Weidel stands for – and actively pursues – a political project that targets anyone who dares to deviate from reactionary gender norms by living like she herself does.

It is often suggested that Weidel might merely be tolerating a coalition with more radical figures in her own party, that she is strategically keeping the peace with the AfD’s extremist wing in spite of her own, more moderate convictions. But there is nothing moderate about the worldview or political ideas of Alice Weidel.

In an interview with the rightwing magazine The American Conservative in early January, for instance, Weidel revealed deep-seated ethno-nationalist convictions. She bemoaned that “Germans are a defeated people” and emphasized her desire to return Germany to its supposed former glory. As her inspiration in this cause, she cited philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) who became a key figure in the intellectual history of the Völkisch movement, Germany’s blood-and-soil nationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Fichte’s overall work cannot be reduced to this tradition; but the part that Weidel invokes is all about the idea of a supposedly superior German people (the Volk) and culture that would ultimately enable Germany to rise from the ashes of defeat at the hands of Napoleon. It’s not a coincidence that Weidel shares that particular love for Fichte with the extremist Höcke wing of her party.

While Fichte references may seem all high-minded and educated, Weidel is also plugged into the usual conspiratorial nonsense that is all too familiar to observers of the American far right. Weidel constantly whines about leftist domination in all spheres of life, about being victimized for standing up to radical leftist orthodoxy. In the American Conservative, she explained that “the political left has built up an enormous monopoly of opinion for many decades,” that the state was entirely “dominated by leftists.”

In her conversation with Musk, she went on endlessly about how the German mainstream media never let her speak; about how young people in Germany learn nothing at school but “woke socialist gender stuff” (to which a shocked Musk responded that “the woke mind virus has affected Germany quite badly.”) Oh, and did you know that the AfD stands alone against what Weidel terms “the uniparty”: They are all the same, those other parties, very much including the “leftish-green” CDU that is in fact not conservative, if Weidel is to be believed, but just another agent of radical woke leftism. The spectrum of acceptable opinion, to Alice Weidel, starts and ends with the AfD.

Weidel’s conspiracism extends to her understanding of German history. When asked by Musk to respond to the notion that the AfD was a far-right party, Weidel went off. A leftist smear campaign was behind such accusations, of course – an attempt to associate the AfD with Hitler. Ah, but Hitler, Weidel declared, was actually a communist! Her argument, if we want to call it that, is exactly as bizarre as you would expect: “As the word says, they were socialist,” Weidel raged on: “The worst thing in our history was to label Adolf Hitler rightwing, a conservative …

He was a communist, socialist guy – and we are exactly the opposite.” The Nazi antisemitism? A “leftish movement.” The persecution of German and European Jews? “A socialist measure.” All the silliest rightwing talking points you could gather from any extremist online forum. How very respectable.

Just a few days after her live chat with Musk, the AfD party convention crowned Weidel candidate for chancellor. In her speech, she played all the hits: She raged against the “leftist mob,” promised to seal the border, and committed to pursuing mass deportations: “If it’s to be called remigration, then it’s just called remigration.” German MAGA. Germany First.

Tensions and frictions within the MAGA-AfD alliance

Strip away the pretensions and ignore the attempts to sanitize: The AfD is exactly what it looks like. So is MAGA. In that sense, the fact that they consider each other allies should not surprise anyone. Is there still something to be learned from their public love affair – does it tell us anything we don’t already know about the politics, ideology, and project of the far right on either side of the Atlantic?

Things get interesting if we focus on the tensions and contradictions in the Musk/MAGA-AfD relationship. There was one real disagreement between Musk and Weidel during their live chat: When Weidel started raging against renewable energies, Musk stepped in to emphasize that he liked solar and wind power. Weidel quickly pretended to agree with Musk – throughout the conversation she displayed a level of sycophancy that was quite remarkable. But we know Weidel really does not agree with Musk at all. The AfD has promised to tear down all wind turbines, which Weidel, in her speech at the party convention in January, called “windmills of shame.” To the AfD, anything associated with environmentalism, anything “green,” is part of the larger leftist assault, just more evidence of how Germany is constantly being victimized by evil leftist forces. Wind turbines, in this interpretation, are as much part of a campaign to shame the German people and break their spirit as the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Donald Trump, who often brings up his utterly bizarre hatred for wind farms (they cause cancer somehow?!), would certainly agree. But Musk and the tech-feudalist faction of the MAGA coalition combine an aggressive disdain for liberalism with a euphoric embrace of technological progress – reminiscent of what the historian Jeffrey Herf, working on the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, has termed “reactionary modernism.”

Secondly, as much as Musk and Weidel wanted to present a united front, they are pursuing different ideas on immigration. Once again, the AfD is most closely aligned with the America First nativist wing of the MAGA coalition: Seal the border, cleanse the nation from all foreigners, don’t let anyone in who doesn’t look properly “German” by the AfD’s ethno-nationalist standards. The rightwing tech lords, on the other hand, maintain they should have unfettered access to cheap labor – if that brings a few brown people into the country, who cares? The tech right, to be clear, aren’t any less racist than the MAGA nativists or the AfD Germany Firsters. They are eugenicists who strongly believe in racialized and gendered hierarchies. But they aren’t quite as focused on the nation as the container for their eugenicist dystopia – at the very least, they believe the nation must make allowances for their business interests. Musk is opposed to any political project of egalitarianism, but not to foreigners being here working for him for little money and with little rights.

Finally, both Musk and Vance seem completely oblivious to the aggressive anti-American sentiment on the German far right. In the AfD’s interpretation, America is chiefly responsible for destroying Germany’s former glory. When Weidel talks about present-day Germany as a “defeated nation” under siege from nefarious outside forces, she counts America among those foreign enemies. In her interview with The American Conservative, Weidel dreamed of the German people regaining a “spirit of freedom” – which, to her, meant breaking free from the American empire which treated Germany as, in her words, “a slave.”

Elon Musk’s encounter with Alice Weidel was, in this sense, a good reminder that the far right doesn’t exist as a monolithic bloc – not in any one country, and certainly not across national boundaries. There are real frictions. But their live chat was also indicative of what unites the different far-right factions and what keeps them from turning on each other, at least for the moment. One thing Musk and Weidel wholeheartedly agreed on was their disdain for any kind of state or legal regulation of market interests. Musk kept raging about how ridiculous it supposedly was for the German authorities to present him with extensive paperwork – when all he wanted to do was open a Tesla factory near Berlin, can you believe it? This is the purest Musk: Indignant that anyone would have the audacity to apply the rules to him, when he is convinced that everything he does is in the immediate interest of propelling humanity to the future (environmental regulations? Labor laws? Tax agreements? An enlightened genius like Elon cannot be bothered with such puny nuisance!). For both Musk and Weidel, the market-fundamentalist anti-statism is driven partially by the plutocratic interests of the business right, and partially by the idea that state institutions have been taken over by radical leftist forces and therefore exist as the enemy’s power center.

It is that anti-“Left” sentiment that really defines the political identify of the far right more than anything else. It’s what integrates the different factions. Any affirmation of egalitarian pluralism, any attempt to level discriminatory hierarchies of race, gender, religion, or wealth: That, to the far right, is “the Left.” It is a shared sense of being under siege from these “leftist” forces, of being victimized by the constant onslaught of a “liberal” offensive in all spheres of life that unites them.

What did it all amount to?

Since the election of Donald Trump in November, a sense of impending doom for liberal democracy has shaped the political discourse across the “West.” Against this background of shock and uncertainty, Elon Musk started his unprecedented public interference on behalf of the AfD. Underlying much of the coverage of the German election campaign was the vague assumption that the wealthiest man on the planet, with an unprecedented propaganda platform at his disposal, throwing his weight behind the AfD *had* to matter somehow. On Sunday morning, for instance, before the results were available, MSNBC suggested that “Elon Musk puts his finger on the scale in Germany.” Combine that with the general sense of dread among all those who prefer liberal democracy over rightwing authoritarianism, and defeatist narratives about the inevitability of an AfD triumph seemed all too plausible.

We now have the actual results, however. Yes, the far right is stronger than it has ever been in German post-war history. But there really isn’t much evidence to suggest that Musk played a major role or that the MAGA endorsement helped the AfD.

All information we have available right now is necessarily preliminary, of course. But here is what we can say with some level of certainty: Polling averages had the AfD at about 16 percent in the summer. From there, the party had been on a fairly steady upward trajectory. By the time chancellor Olaf Scholz announced his decision to seek a snap election in November, the AfD had reached about 18 percent. Apart from a continuation of the slight upward trend, not much changed in the polls when Musk got involved: Not when he endorsed the AfD on his propaganda platform, not when he doubled down in his op-ed for Die Welt in late December. Polling averages then stalled around 20 to 21 percent at the start of the year. They hardly showed any movement when Musk and Weidel had their little chat, or when Musk greeted the AfD convention via video message. The final result: The AfD got 20.8 percent of the vote.

Looking at these numbers, the most plausible interpretation, it seems to me, is that Musk didn’t have much of an impact either way. To the extent Musk fans were mobilized, other potential AfD voters must have been driven away. Some may have felt a kind of patriotic impulse to reject foreign interference. Musk also employed the kind of overt Nazi rhetoric – on January 4, for instance, he called vice-chancellor Robert Habeck a “traitor to the German people” – that was very unlikely to help the AfD. Far-right parties depend on support from people who self-identify as mainstream conservatives, and they tend to regard open Nazism as uncouth.

There are also structural reasons that help explain why Musk’s influence was most likely very limited. The structural factors that allow extremist billionaires to exert so much direct political power in the United States are not present to the same extent in Germany: It’s not as easy to buy elections as it has been in America since the rightwing majority on the Supreme Court completely changed the landscape of how elections are financed with its Citizens United decision in 2010, allowing outside spending (meaning: not from candidates or their campaigns) from big donors to completely dominate. Another important difference: The information environment under which the German election took place is not nearly as disastrous as the one in which politics is being conducted in America. The conditions were, overall, less conducive to producing the kind of impact a rightwing billionaire may have hoped for.

Don’t fall for the false bravado

My biggest takeaway from what has transpired in recent weeks is probably this: We must not give in to either cynicism or defeatism and instead resist the temptation to perpetuate rightwing assertions of liberal democracy’s supposedly inevitable fall. There is indeed a transnational rightwing assault on democratic pluralism, and we must be alert to the far-right networks and channels of influence that are being created with the single purpose of undermining the system. But let’s not buy into the idea that democracy is destined to capitulate to the far right. Let’s not needlessly bolster the image of overwhelming strength that people like Steve Bannon, who would like to be seen as the international masterminds orchestrating the far right’s triumph, want to project.

I steadfastly believe that it is a mistake for mainstream actors and institutions to platform or “debate” far-right politicians and activists who are never arguing in good faith and only seek to establish an aura of “respectability” for their extremist ideas. And yet, I sincerely wish everyone who – rightfully! – worries about the fate of liberal democracy would listen to the Ex-Twitter conversation between Elon Musk and Alice Weidel. In an attempt to platform each other, Musk and Weidel demonstrated the ridiculousness of their grievances, and after 85 rambling minutes, both emerged as utter fools. Weidel’s performance was remarkably amateurish. Mightily struggling to express herself in English, she seemed unprepared and uninformed. Asked by Musk what she would do about the situation in Gaza, she bluntly explained that “after the Hamas attack, I looked on google maps to see the geographic situation down there.” Oh, that’s reassuring.

Both Weidel and Musk oscillated between meandering boringness and unhinged conspiracy theories – both of them getting all riled up about the made-up horror stories they told each other. The German government instructed millions of dangerous immigrants to just throw away their passports so they cannot be deported, Weidel explained. “That’s crazy!” Musk replied. But actually, it’s just like in America, he quickly told Weidel: a “massive influx of criminals into the U.S.,” and no one can do anything about it, because they also just leave their passports on huge piles on the Mexican side of the border. And it gets worse: In California, the “far left” has made theft legal, Musk claimed, a strategy cooked up by George Soros himself! Just stop enforcing the law to bring America down. “That’s crazy!” Alice Weidel gasped in response.

In the last twenty minutes, the conversation went to even weirder places. After about an hour, the two of them had clearly run out of silly conspiracy theories to share. But Weidel was not going to let this opportunity pass without begging the great Elon Musk to enlighten her about the meaning of life. I am not kidding: “Why do you want to fly to Mars? When will you be ready?” Those are definitely the kinds of questions that needed to be asked six weeks before the German election. As Musk went on and on about “the nature of the universe” – a man who constantly mistakes random thoughts for deep philosophical insight will definitely go there, when prompted – Weidel only interjected to say “Wow” or “Woah”. And to urge the great Elon oracle on to keep rambling: “Do you believe in God?” To which Musk replied: “I am certainly open to the idea of God.” But there probably was no God right now, he mused, because – have you ever thought about it?! – evil things happen in the world. The last words of the German far right’s political leader in her much-anticipated conversation with the wealthiest man on the planet that was supposed to guarantee the AfD a victory in the German election? More sycophancy: “These words are so beautiful. It was wonderful talking to you, and listening to your views of mankind, it is very visionary.”

Look, I am fully aware there is no law of nature that says democracy can’t be brought down by a bunch of ignorant megalomaniacs and buffoons. And there are certainly others on the far right who combine ideological zealotry with a significantly higher degree of competence. It is a massive challenge to strike the right balance between articulating clearly that liberal democracy is under acute threat – and needlessly perpetuating the far right’s assertions of strength and dominance. I am not the right person to tell you there is no need to be alarmed. I am alarmed. But if democracy falls, it is not because those who want to abolish it are so smart and brilliant. They are not cunning geniuses or irresistibly magnetic political superpowers. Resistance against those people will never be futile. They are, in so many ways, the worst.