The Hill reports:

Vice President-elect JD Vance took to the social platform X on Thursday to share an op-ed by Elon Musk in which the tech mogul expressed support for the far-right German political party Alternative for Germany, or AfD.

Quoting Musk’s English version of the opinion piece, Vance said it was an “interesting piece.”

The vice president-elect emphasized that he wasn’t endorsing AfD in the upcoming German elections, as it was not his country and “we hope to have good relations with all Germans.”

He further took aim at U.S. media outlets, adding that “American media slanders AfD as Nazi-lite, But AfD is most popular in the same areas of Germany that were most resistant to the Nazis.”

Musk, a key ally of President-elect Trump, wrote the guest opinion piece in the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag. In his piece, the Tesla CEO touched on a variety of issues that, in his view, Germany needs to address as it nears an “economic and cultural collapse.”

He also claimed in a separate post on X that “only the AfD can save Germany.”

The paper’s commentary editor resigned in protest of the op-ed, and the German government on Monday accused Musk of trying to influence its February election.

In response to Vance’s tweet, Germany’s ambassador to the U.S. Andreas Michaelis called it an “interesting observation” in a post on Bluesky.

“Historical context can be tricky – while some areas you are referring to resisted the Nazi party early on, others did not, or later became strongholds of the regime. Germany’s history reminds us how important it is to challenge extremism in all its forms,” he wrote. [Continue reading…]