A new age of American interference in Europe


Meloni thanking Musk for introducing her at an awards gala in Manhattan last September. Musk has aligned himself with far right world leaders. — ©2025 The New York Times Company

FOR the past 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 Make America Great Again (Maga) movement to seize territory, oust elected leaders and empower far-right causes and parties.

Even before he retakes office, Trump is making threats – perhaps serious, perhaps not – to acquire the territory of North Atlantic security pact Nato allies like Canada and Denmark while using his social media platform X to bring the far-right into mainstream politics in other European nations.

It is not clear if Europe’s political immune system has the antibodies to defend against these new incursions.

Sowing chaos

Musk spent a US$250mil slice of his US$400bil (RM1.13bil) fortune to help Donald Trump get re-elected. He arguably had just as much influence on United States’ 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, Musk revived a decade-old “grooming gangs” scandal that unfolded while Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose centre-left Labour Party is in power, was head of public prosecutions. Fanning the flames that were kindled by right-wing media outlets, Musk has called Starmer “utterly despicable” and said 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, Musk is also considering a US$100mil donation to Britain’s far-right Reform Party, which would be the country’s largest political donation ever.

“Maga hates Starmer,” said a former Trump administration official.

“But Maga loves Meloni,” he added, referring to Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, “as long as she meets her deportation targets.”

Musk’s SpaceX is also in talks with Meloni’s government to provide secure military communications through its Starlink satellite network. At a news conference recently, she described Musk as a “very rich person who is expressing his opinions.”

In Germany, which is holding snap federal elections next month, 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.

Since Musk first endorsed the AfD in December, the party’s candidate for chancellor Alice Weidel’s posts on X have routinely gone viral, in part because he reposts them, along with numerous neo-Nazi accounts that have been reinstated and amplified.

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 Adolf Hitler, who formed a coalition with centrist conservatives, has 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, said. “Musk is normalising us.”

Overt vs covert

US 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 US allies. That’s disorienting for Europeans who grew up imbibing American lessons about democracy after World War II.

The US 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 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 US.

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 grievances

Influence campaigns work best when they tap into existing grievances. As in the US, 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’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 Farage declined to endorse 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.” — ©2025 The New York Times Company

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Europe , Maga , far right

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