The Economist: What Elon Musk gets wrong about Europe’s hard right

Key topics:Elon Musk aligns with Europe’s hard-right, fuelling extremist narratives.Italy and France see moderating hard-right leaders balancing power and pragmatism.Germany and Britain face radicalisation, with limited checks or rising parliamentary risks..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com© 2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved..The Economist.Last weekend Elon Musk crossed a line by addressing a “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London. Organised by Tommy Robinson, a convicted criminal who preaches anti-Muslim bigotry, the event drew a crowd of more than 100,000, including extremists and ordinary Britons who shamefully chose to associate with a violent fringe movement. Mr Musk has cultivated ties with insurgent hard-right parties across Europe, not just in Britain. The continent, he maintains, faces being overrun by Muslims, demographic disaster and oppression by corrupt elites. It can be saved only by disruptive parties that represent the true voice of citizens (take it as read: white, Christian ones). Like many in America he imagines a MAGA-like movement galvanising the old continent.In fact, lumping together Europe’s hard-right forces is misleading. They all share a hostility to immigration and all things woke, a fondness for conspiracy theories and an extreme pugnacity on social-media platforms, not least Mr Musk’s own X. But their paths are different. In two countries, Italy and France, the hard right appears to be moderating as it gets closer to power. In Germany the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is radicalising further, but remains distant from power. Britain is in flux: as the rally showed, extreme views are becoming normalised, while the electoral system could yet propel the hard right into office..Read more:.The Economist: Elon Musk threatens to deepen the rift between Europe and America.Giorgia Meloni in Italy is the only of those who is actually in power. When she soared in the polls on the path to victory in 2022, liberals panicked. Here, they feared, was a future prime minister rooted in post-fascist politics, who might unleash culture wars at home and an economic crisis in the European Union. Yet in office Ms Meloni has proved pragmatic. She has been firm, though far from xenophobic, on illegal migration, but has done little to weaponise cultural issues, beyond trying to restrict surrogacy. She has cleaved to fiscal discipline, supported Ukraine against Russia and avoided open conflict with the EU. Her calculation is clear: Italy’s economy depends on European largesse, its companies on the single market, its bonds on the European Central Bank’s support.Jordan Bardella, heir apparent to Marine Le Pen in France and party president of her National Rally, shows early signs of following a similar script. A slick and personable operator, he is now courting business and is positioning himself as his party’s more moderate face ahead of a probable tilt at the presidency in 2027, supposing that Ms Le Pen remains ineligible to run after a conviction (which she is appealing) for misusing funds. Mr Bardella wants to reassure boardrooms that a National Rally presidency need not mean fiscal ruin or a euro crisis. Whether he can honour that promise is doubtful. But even the act of wooing the establishment marks a shift.Contrast those two cases with the AfD. It thrives in Germany’s east, where disaffection with the state runs deep. Its rhetoric is xenophobic and pro-Russian. It has been designated as “right-wing extremist” by the domestic-intelligence agency. Nonetheless a “firewall” put up by mainstream parties who refuse to work with it has so far blocked it from national or state-level office. It did well last year in state elections in the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, but without coalition partners failed to turn protest into power. And local elections in North Rhine Westphalia, outside its eastern base, on September 14th showed its limited appeal west of the Elbe: it increased its share but failed to break out of the poorer areas.Britain is the new battle ground. Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, has been careful to distance himself from Mr Robinson and the violent right: he was wisely absent from the rally. But as public anger over immigration intensifies, Reform’s rhetoric has grown more radical, with proposals for mass deportations. It is polling at around 30%, far ahead of any other party. Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system means that vote share could be turned into a parliamentary majority, although the next election is not due until 2029.Even in the countries where the hard right is moderating, complacency would be a mistake. Mr Bardella still rails against immigrants. The solution to many of Europe’s strategic problems—inadequate defence, declining competitiveness, a lack of innovation—is further European integration, which runs against the instincts of all of its hard-right and nationalist parties. Nonetheless there is a difference between wreckers and co-opted populists. In Italy, and perhaps France, the hard right is discovering that to win and then govern is to compromise. The continent’s politics are not being crushed by a monolith. They are being reshaped—unevenly, and, we hope, less catastrophically, than Mr Musk would like.

The Economist: What Elon Musk gets wrong about Europe’s hard right

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