New York Times Berlin bureau chief Katrin Bennhold made Tuesday’s front page with a “News Analysis” titled “MAGA Forces Push Message Across Europe.” Bennhold’s reporting focuses solely on the dangers of the “far right” in Germany, or at least groups and personalities which she identifies as such.
There were eleven uses of "far right" in this article, and no "far left." This time, Bennhold’s designated villain out to disrupt the world is well-known to Americans: space entrepreneur and Trump pal Elon Musk.
For the last 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 MAGA movement to seize territory, oust elected leaders and empower far-right causes and parties.
Even before he retakes office, Mr. Trump is making threats -- perhaps serious, perhaps not -- to acquire the territory of NATO allies like Canada and Denmark. And Mr. Musk, the president-elect’s biggest financial supporter, is using his social media platform X to bring the far-right Alternative for Germany party into the mainstream and smear the leaders of Britain’s center-left Labour Party.
It is not clear if Europe’s political immune system has the antibodies to defend against these new incursions.
Antibodies? If the right-wingers described illegal migrants as a virus, they would lose it.
This is not the first time a Trump ally has attempted to build a bridge with the European far right. In 2018 and 2019, the Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon held meetings with far-right politicians across Europe. But the political landscape now is very different. The governments of Germany and France have collapsed; far-right parties are on the rise in those countries, and are already in power in several others across the continent.
Bennhold blamed the resurfacing of the shamefully under-addressed rape scandals in Northern UK cities, involving "grooming gangs" of men of Pakistani-origin, on Musk working in concert with "right-wing media outlets." She even played the Hitler card!
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 Hitler, who formed a coalition with centrist conservatives, has so far kept this firewall in place.
Firewall? So the right-wingers are both a virus and a fire. The laugh line came when Bennhold quotes a German politician:
But now the MAGA movement seems to be intentionally sowing discord within U.S. allies. That’s disorienting for Europeans who grew up imbibing American lessons about democracy after World War II.
“I can’t remember a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country in the history of the western democracies,” said Friedrich Merz, the leader and chancellor candidate of the center-right Christian Democrats….
Really? The British Labour Party tried to influence the U.S. election just a few months ago in support of Kamala Harris, with Labour’s Sofia Patel bragging online about sending “nearly 100” party staff to America to help Harris out.
Eventually Bennhold injected a bit of reality, though of course it was first stamped with an ideological warning label:
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.”
Bennhold, who is hypersensitive to any moves on the right, found nice things to say about East German communism: “Eastern women, who were part of the work force and with free child care, were more emancipated than their western sisters, and proved to be more mobile than their male counterparts.”
