Wasn’t it just the other day that the progressive legacy media in the US were accusing Elon Musk of being Hitler? Apparently his day job(s) aren’t keeping him busy enough because the German progressive legacy media are singing the same song:
The Christmas holidays are over, the politicians and the media have awakened from their winter sleep, and Germany finds itself in the thick of an election campaign. Almost every day there is a new poll, and in almost every new poll, Alternative für Deutschland gets stronger. An Infratest dimap poll published on 9 January (survey conducted from 6–8 January) pegs them at 20%; a Forschungsgruppe Wahlen poll published on 10 January (survey conducted from 7–9 January) has them at 21%; and the latest INSA poll, published today (survey conducted from 6–10 January) places them at 22%:
For the centre-right CDU and CSU, the story is the opposite – one of a steady decline from the low- to mid-30s in December, to around 30% or just below in the latest surveys. The right-leaning vote overall is holding steady, at around 51%. Support is merely wandering from the acceptable Union parties behind the cordon sanitaire. Every day the establishment loses a few more seats; they vanish into the abyss of the Brandmauer, and the hurdles to the lusted-after CDU/CSU-Green coalition grow ever higher.
Some of this is surely down to the Musk Effect. Musk’s endorsement of the AfD and his conversation with Alice Weidel on Thursday (however much a disappointment I found it be) has surely normalised the party for a small but significant number of German voters. The media vilification of the American tycoon is as unbalanced and hysterical as it is unconvincing …
The latest cover of Stern magazine: “Attack on our election: Fake news, cyber warfare and rabble-rousing – this is how Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin are manipulating the German election.”
… and it comes all too late. Until December, Musk enjoyed mainstream credibility in Germany; our rulers eagerly celebrated his Gigafactory in Berlin-Brandenburg as a sign that all was not so terrible for German industry after all. They made Musk into a symbol for the carbon-free, electrical-vehicle future that awaits us all. It is hard to turn around in an instant and reconstruct the man as literally Hitler.
