Musk pushes ‘Make Europe Great Again’ slogan amid EU inquiry

Elon Musk is continuing a campaign of support for hard-right parties in Europe, including AfD party candidates in the German election, and on Saturday another post on X further signalled his intentions:

“Make American Great Again” has long been the rallying cry of Donald Trump, who is further to the right than any Republican president in the United States in living memory.

And it was also the slogan of Hungary’s presidency of the EU in 2024 under populist, hard-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Musk’s megaphone sloganeering has unnerved many political leaders in Europe, and this week the EU was fighting back by stepping up its investigation of X’s algorithms.

On Thursday the European Commission requested documents relating to X’s “recommender systems” that suggests to users what they might want to read next on the platform.

“Today we are taking further steps to shed light on the compliance of X’s recommender systems with the obligations under the DSA,” Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, Henna Virkunnen said.

In reply Musk says he is a champion of free speech and democracy and accuses European leaders and other critics of trying to limit them.

In August 2024 The Center for Countering Digital Hate, a US-based human rights and civil liberties group, found that Musk’s “false or misleading claims about the US elections” were viewed by nearly 1.2 billion times on X.