The most powerful voice in other people's elections: Musk abroad, 2023–2026

Foreigners comment on other countries' elections all the time. Columnists do it, presidents do it, and in most democracies there is nothing illegal about it. What makes Elon Musk different is the combination: the world's richest man, the owner of X, with one of the most-followed accounts on it, and at times a senior figure in the US government, taking sides in campaigns abroad and attacking the elected leaders and judges of allied countries.

Our Musk tracker records these interventions with their sources. The pattern is now clear enough to describe.

Germany: the most sustained campaign

Germany's snap election of February 2025 drew Musk's most sustained involvement in any foreign vote. In late 2024 he called Chancellor Olaf Scholz a fool after his coalition collapsed, posted that "only the AfD can save Germany", and after the Magdeburg Christmas market attack called on Scholz to resign. He called President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who had warned against outside influence on the election and named X, "an anti-democratic tyrant".

He then wrote a guest article in Welt am Sonntag calling the AfD "the last spark of hope", hosted a live conversation with its candidate Alice Weidel on X, and addressed the party's campaign launch by video, telling the audience there was "too much focus on past guilt".

The response crossed party lines. The conservative leader Friedrich Merz, who went on to become chancellor, called the intervention "overbearing and presumptuous" and said he could recall nothing comparable in a friendly country's campaign. Poland's prime minister said the Halle remarks sounded "all too familiar and ominous". The AfD finished second, with about a fifth of the vote; whether Musk changed any votes is impossible to measure.

Britain: from the riots to the rally

In Britain the interventions began with unrest rather than an election. During the riots of August 2024 Musk posted that "civil war is inevitable"; Downing Street said there was "no justification" for it. In December he met Nigel Farage at Mar-a-Lago as Reform UK said a donation had been discussed, prompting ministers to look again at the rules on foreign money in British politics. Weeks later he said Reform "needs a new leader".

In January 2025 he directed a burst of posts at the safeguarding minister and the prime minister over grooming gangs, called for the release of the jailed activist Tommy Robinson, and in September 2025 told a Robinson-organised rally in London by video that there must be "a dissolution of parliament" and "you either fight back or you die". Downing Street called that "dangerous and inflammatory language".

Romania, Venezuela, Canada: courts and borders

When Romania's Constitutional Court annulled the 2024 presidential election over suspected Russian-backed interference, Musk called its president "a tyrant, not a judge", and called the later barring of the leading candidate "crazy". In Venezuela, he accused Nicolás Maduro of election fraud, a claim many governments shared, and Maduro then ordered X suspended. In Canada, after praising the Conservative leader in 2025, he wrote in October 2026 that Quebec, Alberta and Saskatchewan should separate. Prime Minister Mark Carney replied that Canada's future "will be decided by Canadians", free from "large tech firms that think they can tell us what to do".

Why it is different

Four things set these interventions apart from ordinary foreign commentary.

1. He owns the platform. The posts appear on a network whose rules, recommendation systems and enforcement he controls. Several governments have accused X of failing to act on illegal content during the same period (see the EU, UK and India entries in the tracker).
2. He attacks institutions, not just parties. Presidents, prime ministers and constitutional court judges in Germany, Britain, Romania, Brazil, Spain and elsewhere have been called tyrants, traitors or worse. In Brazil, a Supreme Court justice opened an inquiry into Musk himself.
3. He has been close to power at home. Many of the European posts came while Musk was a prominent ally of, and then an adviser in, the US administration, which made it harder for governments to treat them as one citizen's opinions.
4. His companies need these governments. Starlink needs licences in the same countries whose leaders he criticises, as the India and South Africa records show.

The case on the other side

Musk and his supporters argue that he is exercising free speech, often on behalf of voters he says are ignored by their own establishments, and that criticising judges and governments is what free speech is for. Some of the causes he has backed, such as challenging Maduro's disputed result, had wide international support. And voters in Germany, Britain, Romania and Canada made their own decisions.

Those arguments deserve a hearing. But they do not settle the question governments are now asking: what rules should apply when one person owns a major political platform, uses it to campaign in other countries' elections, and runs companies that depend on those countries' regulators. That question is likely to outlast any single election. The tracker will go on recording the evidence.