The Brussels elite have contended they are defending liberal democracy against authoritarianism at home and abroad. Their strident criticism of Elon Musk’s recent forays into European politics suggests that might not be true.
Musk has weighed in heavily in support of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the run-up to the February 23 German election. He has also endorsed Nigel Farage’s Reform Party in the United Kingdom, although he has also said that he doesn’t think Farage has what it takes to win.
Either intervention would be unusual coming from an American centibillionaire. Were he to have simply made his comments in an interview, though, they would at most likely have engendered a mere shrug or quick rejoinder.
The fact that Musk owns one of the world’s leading social media platforms, X, and has a prominent personal account on it is what is driving the elites mad.
His control of X means that someone favourably inclined toward conservative populism can outflank the elites’ control – informal in many cases, formal in others – over the flow of information available by mass media.
Citizens no longer are limited to what they read in elite-edited papers or hear over elite-run television and radio. They are thus able to hear conservative populist opinions and arguments directly rather than have them filtered or distorted by their political adversaries.
That, the elites fear, threatens their hold on power. And that is something they increasingly show is their bottom line, not defence of liberal democracy.
Liberal democracy ultimately rests on two premises. The first is the democratic element: the people, through robust debate and competition, decide who rules them. The second is the liberal element: such debate must be open to all and respect the rights to participate of all, even those whom those currently in power despise.
That latter element is what distinguishes modern liberal democracy from its ancient and medieval cousins. Those regimes limited who could participate through restrictions on who could vote or hold office, usually preserving political honours for the rich or those holding entrenched beliefs. They also limited which ideas could be discussed at all, often through formal censorship.
The liberal democrats of the 18th through the early 20th centuries always took aim at these restrictions. Universal suffrage was their political goal; freedom of speech and of the press – meaning of the printed word, not special protections for professional journalists – was their social goal.
Those battles were not won in much of Europe until the early 20th century and were too easily swept aside in the tumult leading to the Great Depression and World War II. Most of Western Europe only secured those rights with the defeat of Nazi Germany. It took the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to finally bring them to Central and Eastern Europe.
Friends of liberal democracy must uphold these principles without wavering if they are to be truly committed to that cause.
You cannot protect liberal democracy by preventing people from hearing from dissenting voices. You cannot enshrine liberal democracy if you run fraudulent elections or ignore the outcome of legitimate ones.
Yet this is exactly what many in the Brussels elite tolerate, do, or propose.
The European Union’s ruling powers have remained silent in the face of the unprecedented annulment of the first round of Romania’s presidential election.
The alleged basis for that act is a Russian-financed or directed social media campaign on TikTok and other platforms. In other words, they cancelled an election because Romanians liked the arguments they read on social media rather than the ones propagated on state media.
Imagine if Hungary’s courts did that after the election scheduled for 2026, or if Poland’s courts did that in the face of the ruling party’s defeat in the 2023 parliamentary election.
Germany has had an informal “shadow ban” on allowing AfD access to media for years. Only 2.6 per cent of the participants in political talk shows on Germany’s public television stations were affiliated with AfD in 2024 even though they hold ten per cent of the Bundestag’s seats and currently sit at 20 per cent in the polls. No other party had such a stark disparity.
German public television is also refusing to invite AfD’s leader, Alice Weidel, to participate in this year’s main election debate between public support and public discussants.
Musk’s intervention, however, means this information dam cannot hold. He has already broken the informal ban on AfD supporters writing op-eds in the nation’s leading newspapers with a piece in Die Welt.
His interview of Weidel on X last week meant that hundreds of thousands of Germans could hear her directly, probably for the first time. Millions more will be able to listen to archives of that discussion on the internet.
That, apparently, is too much for these self-appointed priests of democracy. Up to 150 EU officials allegedly monitored the broadcast, ostensibly to see if any law had been broken. One can only imagine what these fertile minds are coming up with.
Some figures have called for Musk to be investigated, perhaps classifying his speech as an illegal campaign donation. Former EU Internal Market Commission Thierry Breton has even said that X could be banned throughout Europe. He is not alone.
Breton also went so far as to say that the Commission should annul the results of the German election if they were subject to “foreign interference”. In other words, if the Germans listen to someone other than the purveyors of the official line, democracy must be sacrificed to preserve . . . democracy.
European elites are losing their grip on power because they have failed their people consistently for decades. That, not TikTok campaigns nor X algorithms, is the proximate cause of conservative populism’s rise.
Yet these elites seem open to chipping away at liberal democracy rather than change course.
Monarchs and popes feared the printing press three hundred years ago, but they could not hold back the tide of public opinion.
Social media and the internet pose the same threat to our ruling elites today. It would be terrible for Europe if they end up adopting the same tactics as the anti-democratic elites of the past in a vain effort to hold back the tidal wave of opinion that is coming.
Conservative populists must recognise the source of their power