The battle for the future German chancellor has currently come down to two letters: Olaf Scholz, the SPD candidate, is being challenged by Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD, a politician whose views are a combination of anti-mainstream politics, a symbiosis of radical conservatism and technology, which resonate well in German society, and almost one in four Germans supports her. The numbers are not particularly favorable to Olaf Scholz: polls rarely show him in an affirmative light, highlighting that almost 77% of German citizens are dissatisfied with his mandate. German voters in the early elections will thus choose not only between two candidates but between two political paradigms: one systemic and burdened by a previous relatively unsuccessful mandate, personified in the person and work of Scholz, and one completely anti-systemic, Eurosceptic and sovereignist, which Alice Weidel embodies.
Elon Musk, the controversial tech mogul, after buying the Twitter platform, renaming it X and promising to advocate for “absolute freedom of speech” - that is, without any restrictions, fact-checking, etc. - used his 212,2 million followers to interview leader Weidel. Musk, after already establishing himself as an innovator and even the elected shadow president, became an ordinary journalist and podcast host. Often slurred in his diction, obsessed with details and excessively verbose, Musk nevertheless proved to be a master at detecting many critical points in German society - energy policy and migration, and the relationship between the local and the global - which are, quite predictably, the main topics of the upcoming elections. Bearing in mind Musk's social power, the alarm went off in the center of the European Union, in Brussels - reportedly many regulatory agencies watched the interview to determine if Elon was meddling in Germany's internal affairs, spreading malign influence and disinformation through his supposedly libertarian platform X.
Musk aimed to present Alice Weidel and her AfD party, which is mostly labeled by the public as a party with dangerous intentions, as a completely normal, cultural and rational political option that is the only one capable of being an alternative to all the recent failures of German politics, starting with Merkel and ending with Scholz. Musk was guided by the idea of introducing many of the AfD's controversial ideas to the general public, dressing them in a cloak of political innocence and authenticity. This is a typical communication tactic in which more extreme ideas are presented as completely normal, typical, logical and completely benign.
Weidel fulfilled her part of the bargain, presenting herself as a conservative-liberal (once this was both ideologically and realistically incompatible) politician. She was revolted by German bureaucracy, we learned from the interview, so Musk shared with her his unpleasant experiences with the administration: poor Elon could not be amazed enough by the administrative apparatus when he opened his factory in Berlin, he was simply shocked by the regulations - he collected about 25.000 pages that he needed to obtain a permit to open a factory. He was bothered - of course - by the necessity of printing, notarizing and stamping the pages. So the rich, like Musk, also cry because of the administrative apparatus. As the conversation progressed, the warm atmosphere between Alice and Elon only became more and more confirmed: both of them advocate for the optimization of the administration, smart taxes and education. Alice believes that high taxes are misdirected into the social sector - so the state is incompetent - so crime is increasing, and young Germans, instead of learning STEM disciplines and the German language, are being indoctrinated "from above", the evil political elites, with gender, leftist, socialist, green, liberal and other agendas.
The ridiculous immigration policy, Weidel will say, has allowed just about anyone to illegally enter Germany, parasitize on that powerful social system, consuming its resources, and the state itself does not want to deport such migrants outright. Then Musk chimed in, saying that the same is true in the US, where it is impossible to deport undocumented people, so anyone can enter that country of prosperity and engage in theft and other various tricks. Alice Weidel advocates for a minimal role for the state when it comes to freedom of thought. She dreams of a critical generation of young Germans who think differently and divergently about various social realities, especially about relations in the world, the conflict in Ukraine and the relationship with Russia. She referred to the elected vice president of America, JD Vance, who advocates for an authentic world in which states are independent and have their own position, and avoid being satellite states, completely dependent on great powers.
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