It was, many observers noted, like a scene from 1984. The face of Elon Musk, head of the new “broligarchy” billionaire boys club backing Donald Trump, projected, Big Brother-like, on a video screen at a rally for Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party on Jan. 25.
Amid roars of applause, Musk’s virtual head called the AfD — a nationalist, anti-immigrant party under surveillance by authorities for suspected illegal extremism — “the best hope for Germany.”
A week after his straight-armed salutes at Trump’s inauguration — the gesture, with its echoes of the Nazi era, is punishable as hate speech in Germany — Musk told the crowd at the rally that Germans are too focused “on past guilt” and “need to move beyond that.” Thanking him, AfD leader Alice Weidel told the crowd: “Let’s make Germany great again!”
On the same day as the rally, tens of thousands of people took to the streets throughout the country to protest the rise of the AfD and far right. In a direct dig at Musk, British campaign group Led by Donkeys, together with German supporters, projected a blow-up image of him making his Hitler-like salute, along with the German word “heil,” onto the Tesla factory outside Berlin.
Germany is holding a snap election on Feb. 23, and Musk appears to be doing his best to hack it. The tech billionaire didn’t cause Germany’s right-wing surge — the AfD has been growing in strength for some time now and is currently polling just behind the conservative CDU at around 20 percent. But, as he did with Trump, Musk is throwing his weight behind the disrupters. He has tweeted his support of the AfD and attacked mainstream German politicians to his millions of followers on X. On Jan. 9, he hosted a live chat (on X) with Weidel where she, bizarrely, and ahistorically, claimed Adolf Hitler was a “communist.”
“Musk’s actions are quite without precedent; you could call this overt foreign interference in European politics,” says Stephan Mündges, a German journalist and researcher with the European Fact-Checking Standards Network. “It goes to show that Mr. Musk is not really about promoting free speech, but about pushing his own political agenda.”
In a debate in the Bundestag, the German parliament, on Jan. 30, legislators from several parties called out Musk for working “against the interests of German democracy,” with the tech billionaire compared to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
“There’s no question that Musk is boosting the profile of AfD, both through X posts and his online chat with Weidel,” says Heidi Beirich, a co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism and an expert on the American and European far right. Beirich compares the AfD’s policies — including Weidel’s calls for the “re-immigration” of German nationals from ethnic minorities to their “countries of origin” — to those of white supremacist groups across Europe and the U.S., including Europe’s Identitarian movement. Identitarians have propagated the false “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that non-white and Muslim immigrants are being brought in to displace white populations in Europe. “That idea is of course directly linked to mass [far-right] attacks, including those in El Paso, Pittsburgh, Halle, and Christchurch,” says Beirich.
This is all coming to a boil as the world’s film industry heads to the German capital for the 75th Berlin International Film Festival. The new Berlinale director, Tricia Tuttle, had hoped, after last year’s awards ceremony was derailed by a political debate over the war in Gaza, to put the spotlight back on the movies. The Berlinale has frequently been the site of activist demonstrations — there were red carpet disruptions last year in remembrance of victims of right-wing violence, in support of Palestinian rights, and against the AfD — but now, the politics on the streets could overshadow the films screening inside.
Tuttle’s lineup is one of Berlin’s best in years. The 75th festival will host the German premiere of Mickey 17, Bong Joon Ho’s sci-fi follow-up to Parasite that stars Robert Pattinson; the world premiere of Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, with Ethan Hawke and Margaret Qualley; and new movies from art-house faves Tom Tykwer (festival opener Das Licht), Michel Franco (Dreams) and Hong Sang-soo (What Does That Nature Say to You?). But with the world on fire, expect the focus to be elsewhere.
Europe’s cinema elite already has joined the political fray. About 2,500 filmmakers and executives — including Oscar winners Juliette Binoche, Volker Schlöndorff and producer Jeremy Thomas, and art house directors Marjane Satrapi, Rebecca Zlotowski, and Jessica Hausner, have signed an online petition, launched Jan. 24, to “Defend Our Democracies Against Tech Giants.” The petition calls out social media platforms, in particular Musk’s X, for alleged “non-compliance with European regulations” that threaten “the future of our democracies” in Europe. Inside Germany, some of the country’s biggest, best-known actors, including Daniel Brühl, Jella Haase, Birgit Minichmayr, Jürgen Vogel, and Sonja Heiss, signed an open letter protesting a Jan. 29 vote in the German parliament in which the conservative CDU party accepted support from the AfD to pass a strict new anti-immigration policy. Until now, Germany’s mainstream parties had refused to work with the AfD in any capacity. The parliamentary vote sparked national protests, and, in a final vote on Jan. 31, the new law was rejected.
CDU leader Friedrich Merz, whose party is ahead in the polls with around 30 percent and is expected to lead the government after the election, insists he will not share power with the far right.
Hannah Pilarczyk, a culture reporter for the German news magazine Spiegel, welcomes the new political engagement from her country’s artists. After months of bickering about international industry matters — reforms to Germany’s film funding systems, budget cuts to Berlin’s arts scene — “refocusing now on the threats that the AfD and its collaborators pose to democracy is a very important sign that artists have an eye on the bigger picture,” she says.
In Tuttle’s first year as Berlinale director, after years running the celebrity-heavy London Film Festival, she had hoped she could return the spotlight to the movies by bringing some red-carpet glitz and glamour back to Berlin.
Whatever their political position, few Berlinale attendees would like to see a repeat of last year’s polemics. First, there was an uproar over the festival’s decision to invite members of the AfD to the opening night gala (the invitations were quickly rescinded). Then the furious debate around the war in Gaza pushed any talk of cinema into the background. Things came to a head at the awards ceremony when one winner after another declared: “I stand with Palestine.” That triggered a media backlash, with politicians and journalists branding the statements as antisemitic, including documentary film winner Yuval Abraham, co-director of the Israeli-Palestinian film No Other Land, calling Israel an “apartheid state.”
“It was a disaster,” says Pilarczyk. “People were afraid of having open discussions around Gaza, and there was no willingness to engage with people from the international arena presenting different opinions.”
Tuttle’s Berlin lineup isn’t apolitical. Among the world premieres this year are Das Deutsche Volk, which looks at deadly far-right attacks in the German city of Hanau in 2020, and Berlin also will host a special screening of Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s landmark Holocaust documentary, on the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of Auschwitz.
“We live in a very difficult world, and there are many films in the festival that confront the difficulties of the world,” Tuttle tells THR. “But we want the focus to be on the movies. We want the filmmakers to get the attention they deserve. We want people to come together and enjoy talking to each other about cinema.”
Musk has other plans. As Germany prepares for its biggest election in decades, with the world’s richest man actively fanning the flames of far-right extremism, the Berlinale finds itself, again, in the heart of a political firestorm.
This story appeared in the Feb. 5 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.