How far right will Germany go?

With only a few weeks until Germany's election, Elon Musk has unambiguously thrown his support behind the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

- MARK FITZPATRICK

With only a few weeks until Germany's election, Elon Musk has unambiguously thrown his support behind the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. In a video address to a party rally last week, he appeared to urge Germans to "move on" from any "past guilt" related to the Holocaust.

"It's good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything."

Troublingly, the AfD is now firmly entrenched as Germany's second-most popular political party, behind the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Like all parties in German elections, however, it cannot win an outright majority. It is also unlikely to be invited to join any ruling coalition that emerges from the February 23 election.

But the AfD's anti-migrant, anti-government sloganeering has already seriously distorted Germany's public debate and democratic culture, leaving many to ask whether it even needs to win elections to see its policies implemented.

This was evident following a dramatic week in Germany's Bundestag. First, in a radical break with Germany's political norms, opposition leader Friedrich Merz deliberately drew on the votes of the AfD to ram a radical anti-asylum seeker motion through the parliament.

It was the first time in the history of the Bundestag that a parliamentary majority was reached with the help of the far right. Merz's action was widely condemned as a "taboo-breaking" step towards legitimising the AfD.

Merz tried to take this a step further with a far-reaching bill to tighten immigration controls. Although the bill narrowly failed, all of the AfD voted with Merz. Twelve members of his own CDU party refused to back him.

Merz's courting of the far right is widely seen as politically unnecessary, given his conservative CDU is already leading the national polls, making him the favourite to succeed the Social Democratic Party (SDP)'s Olaf Scholz as chancellor.