Musk celebrates the AfD’s victory and the anti-immigrant patrols in the UK. The new agitators

Donald Trump reposted the election results from Saxony-Anhalt on his social media platform Truth, without comment: the victory of the AfD, a far-right German party with many links to the Trump camp, can be counted amongst the successes of the US President’s ‘European project’ – if we may call it that – a destabilisation campaign defined in official Administration documents as involving close ties with anti-European and pro-Russian movements and parties across our continent.

The AfD has found a home amongst Trump supporters: last year, Vice-President J. D. Vance travelled to Munich to deliver his rebuke against illiberal Europe (which he considers more threatening than Russia) and, just a few days before the elections that brought Chancellor Friedrich Merz to power, met with AfD leaders. The most ardent supporter is Elon Musk, the tycoon of American public administration efficiency (the State Department is now rehiring many of the people whom Musk’s ‘phantom ministry’, the Doge, had arbitrarily sacked) with ambitions to be a kingmaker of subversion in Europe, who on Sunday took to insulting those who describe the AfD as a ‘far-right’ party – those at the Wall Street Journal, who rightly use this term, were branded “empty-headed fools”. Musk is torn between influencers who gravitate towards the AfD and its extremist views, and British agitators, a great passion of the world’s richest man. For him, Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK – who is himself a Trump supporter from the very beginning and who champions the culture wars dear to this illiberal right – is not subversive enough; Musk prefers Tommy Robinson, the leader of British neo-fascism, and now also his associate, Danny Tommo, who has been in the news recently for inciting anti-immigrant protests in Dover and Portsmouth – Musk shared videos of these events, which look more like vigilante patrols than protests, commenting: “Well done”.

Danny Tommo, whose real name is Daniel Thomas, aged 37, was sentenced to two years in prison in 2016 because, together with two accomplices armed with knives, he had turned up at a man’s home shouting: “You’re coming with us”. A “terrifying” incident, said the judge, as well as a “stupid” one, from which Thomas emerged, two years later, asking for a second chance – and finding it in a religious zeal that led him to form, together with friends he met at church, the Patriot Platform, a small army of “strong” patriots, “capable of resisting” and ready to lash out against immigrants. At the port of Dover on Saturday, three hundred hooded and masked people, all dressed in black, blocked traffic, causing kilometres of tailbacks – this is the UK’s most important international port – to protest against illegal immigration. On Sunday in Portsmouth, around 500 people, again with their faces covered, gathered to prevent the arrival of a boat carrying around 140 migrants. In both cases, the police were caught off guard; in Dover, it took them hours to restore calm, whilst in Portsmouth they were unable to stop some protesters who threw themselves into the water to physically prevent the migrants from being rescued. “Go back home,” the hooded protesters shouted, while Danny Tommo wrote on X, “this is only the beginning,” reiterating that Patriot Platform is a peaceful movement, free from alcohol and drugs, composed of people “tired” of unfulfilled promises. Neither he nor Musk appear interested in the figures showing that illegal immigration via ‘small boats’ across the English Channel has fallen significantly (it is at 2019 levels). Reality – here, in Saxony-Anhalt and within the bubbles of extremism on social media – does not matter; what matters is fanning the flames, creating agitators and stirring up riots. In September last year, speaking at a deeply right-wing Robinson rally, Musk said: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence will come for you. Either you fight back or you die – that is the truth.”