Elon Musk is on a tear as he shakes up politics in Europe. What's his endgame?
CBC
As if having the ear of incoming U.S. president Donald Trump weren't enough, tech billionaire Elon Musk has been on a tear this week, trashing European politicians on both the left and right, and using posts on his social media platform, X, to disrupt politics across the continent.
The French president, politicians in Germany and officials with the European Commission have all felt Musk's online wrath, on issues concerning their electability and alleged hypocrisy. But it's his withering attacks on British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other U.K. politicians that have stood out.
In a 72-hour span starting over the weekend, Musk suggested King Charles should fire Starmer and call a new election, and pushed the false claim that Starmer was "deeply complicit in mass rapes" and should be sent to prison.
Musk also posted that it might be up to the United States to "liberate" Britons from their "tyrannical government."
These accusations have centred on Starmer's role in an ugly chapter of Britain's recent judicial history, concerning the prosecution of gangs of mostly British Pakistani men who groomed and sexually exploited thousands of girls between roughly 1997 and 2013.
Starmer was the head of the country's Crown prosecution system starting in 2008 and oversaw many of the criminal prosecutions. Musk, without any evidence and in the face of repeated inquiries that said otherwise, has blamed Starmer for inaction.
A 2022 inquiry headed by Scottish child protection expert Prof. Alexis Jay concluded that while there was no prosecutorial cover-up, local authorities — but not Starmer — had made mistakes.
Musk also smeared Jess Phillips, the Labour cabinet minister now in charge of women's safeguarding, calling her a "rape genocide" apologist for refusing to heed calls for another national inquiry — even though Jay has said a new inquiry would only delay implementing the recommendations from her report.
Longtime U.K. politics watcher Tim Bale at Queen Mary University of London says Musk's incendiary accusations have put Labour on the defensive and provided fresh ammunition to opponents on the political right.
"In all my years of covering British politics, I can't remember an incident like this," Bale told CBC News. "[Musk's] goal seems to be to destabilize the British government and also to emphasize to Donald Trump that this is not an administration he wants to be friends with."
Starmer's Labour Party is one of the few left-of-centre governments remaining in Europe, with recent elections witnessing seismic shifts to the right, including in Italy, Slovakia and the Netherlands.
Germany's Social Democrats may be the next to fall, with elections coming in February and Chancellor Olaf Scholz widely expected to go down in defeat.
Musk has endorsed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and has said he plans to use X to host a discussion with its leader, Alice Weidel, who's a fierce critic of multiculturalism. Some prominent AfD members have been ostracized for their failure to condemn the war crimes of the Nazis.
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