Elon Musk keeps saying the quiet part out loud. On his platform X today, the world’s richest man declared: “If AfD doesn’t win, Germany is kaput.” Reposting another far-right account celebrating the German far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party’s rise in the polls, Musk, who's previously appeared via satellite at AfD conferences to lavish praise on the party, doubled down on his own earlier line: “Only AfD can save Germany.”

This isn’t just tech-bro provocation. It’s the richest man on Earth throwing his weight behind another Kremlin-backed far-right party, one that cheered Assad’s slaughter in Syria and still takes its cues from the Kremlin. Musk may dress it up as free-speech mischief, but he’s doing what he always does: laundering authoritarianism for global consumption.

Ukraine also knows this all too well. Musk has repeatedly undermined Kyiv, proposing “peace plans” lifted straight from Putin’s playbook while cutting off Starlink access to blunt Ukrainian advances. He smears Ukrainians resisting invasion as “Nazis” — the same script Assad and Putin used to smear Syrians as “terrorists,” which Netanyahu also uses to justify ongoing genocide in Gaza and regional expansion.

Meanwhile, Putin aligns himself with actual neo-Nazis, fascist parties, and terrorist-adjacent figures whenever it suits him. This is his standard arsonist-fireman strategy: feed the flames, then pose as the fire brigade. And he and his imitators and fellow authoritarians can keep using it because it keeps working.

Syria was the template. Assad and Putin adeptly harnessed social media, with a slickly orchestrated authoritarian propaganda campaign inverting reality, reimagining a revolution against tyranny as a terrorist insurgency and using this to justify genocide, branding their victims as “terrorists” and their campaign “counter-terrorism.” Moscow then bombed civilians to force millions into exile as refugees, creating what Western media obediently called a ‘migrant crisis.’ Not a dictator crisis. Not a genocide crisis. A ‘migrant crisis.’ Victims were recast as the threat to civilisation; their killers as its saviours.

That framing, steeped in racism, handed far-right parties across Europe and the world their biggest electoral gift in decades. This was such a successful strategy that Putin and his far-right allies gleefully repeated it elsewhere.

The anti-immigrant AfD is certainly one of the biggest beneficiaries of Putin’s strategy. And lest anyone think backing the far-right is just a Kremlin ploy, the AfD also nurtures deep ties to China’s CCP — AfD co-leader Alice Weidel spent six years in China, while party networks, including aides and MEPs like Maximilian Krah, have been implicated in espionage and affiliations with Chinese intelligence.

And the AfD isn’t alone. Giorgia Meloni won power through adopting the same hyperbolic rhetoric, praising Putin and Assad for “defending Christians,” and lambasting anti-regime Syrians and refugees as terrorists. Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and their peers rose on the back of this tsunami of racist, Islamophobic, anti-refugee hysteria which powered Farage’s Brexit, and won support for Netanyahu and his peers in Israel.
Although white supremacists are divided on Israel and Palestine - with Farage, Trump, Orban, the AfD, Tommy Robinson and others aligning themselves with Netanyahu, while Tucker Carlson, David Duke, Mark Collett Nick Griffin and other more overt neo-nazis use the Palestinian cause as a figleaf — they unite as one behind Putin and Assad. This solidarity and use of Islamophobic tropes also extends across the political spectrum, with far-right and far-left “anti-imperialists” amplifying Kremlin disinformation and conspiracy theories, using the same sectarian slanders, smearing Assad’s chemical massacres as CIA fakes, and demanding that Syrians accept genocidal dictatorship in the name of “stability.”

Netanyahu, too, learned the lesson from Syria where he proudly coordinated with Putin from the first days of Russia’s intervention, boasting of their close ties and using them in his election promotional material. Today he starves and pulverises Gaza under the same branding — the claim that Israel is “fighting terror” — while enjoying support from the very same far-right networks that Putin nurtured. Say “terrorism” often enough and the world applauds and supports genocide or, at worst, politely tuts and looks away, while murmuring about how very unfortunate it all is.

Musk’s AfD boosterism simply strips away the fig leaf. It exposes the convergence that’s been building for years. Last week, Putin and Xi announced their vision of a “new world order” — authoritarian, post-liberal, neither left nor right but a merger of both extremes, which seem closer to a seamless circular fusion than the horseshoe shape usually cited where there’s still a small gap between them. Musk is playing his part, aligning himself with Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Modi, and whichever other strongman serves his interests.

What ties all of this together is the same poisonous logic: victims of dictatorship are collectively smeared as terrorists and extremists, while actual extremists and terror sponsors are rebranded as defenders of civilisation. Syrians know this monstrous geopolitical game all too well, as do Palestinians, Ukrainians, and others living the nightmarish reality in real time.

And the Western pundits who once sneered that Syrians should accept Assad for “stability” and “political realism”? They’re now staring down the barrel of the same “stability” and “political realism” at home. ‘Stability’ under authoritarian rule always means silence — first the silencing of dissent, and ultimately the silence of the max security prison or the mass grave.

If liberals and leftists in the West want to avoid the future Musk and his peers are openly cheerleading for, they could start by admitting the obvious: Assad’s Syria was the laboratory, Gaza is the proof of concept, and Ukraine is the European frontline. Authoritarianism is universal; it doesn’t stop at any borders. Putin is supporting the far-right because they help bring his ideal, silenced world closer.

Heroic dissidents worldwide who have already resisted and are still resisting tyranny and repression — including Syrian, Ukrainian, Palestinian activists and thinkers — are the ones who know best how to fight it. When will the West start listening to them rather than to the dictators?

By Ruth Riegler

Photo: Elon Musk during a surprise appearance via video link at an AfD election campaign event in Halle, eastern Germany on January 25, 2025, where he praised party leader Alice Weidel and spoke publicly in support of the far-right party for the second time in as many weeks.