Elon Musk is on a tear as he shakes up politics in Europe. What’s his endgame?

Elon Musk is on a tear as he shakes up politics in Europe. What’s his endgame?

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.”

France, Norway raise concerns

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.

On Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron slammed Musk for “directly intervening” in elections in Europe. Other EU leaders want to see regulators impose fines and other legal sanctions on Musk for improperly using his social media platform. 

Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre was quoted by Reuters as saying Musk’s political influence has become deeply troubling, and a spokesman for Spain’s government said Tuesday that social media platforms must always act with “absolute neutrality.”

Bale says the aim of Musk’s intervention may be to coerce unfriendly European governments into backing off from tougher legislation that could hurt tech companies. The U.K., for example, has just brought in a new digital regulations act with strengthened oversight of big tech companies and their business models.

“Perhaps [Musk is] going to make it more difficult for the British government to regulate social media platforms,” said Bale.

Fighting with Farage

But having friendly relations with Musk seems no guarantee of avoiding his wrath.

Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK who only three weeks ago lunched at Trump’s Mar-a-Largo estate with Musk and expected the tech mogul to make a big donation to his increasingly popular party, suddenly found himself on the outside, as Musk called for him to be replaced as party leader. 

Reform UK champions policies such as deep cuts to immigration, eliminating net-zero emission goals and drastically reducing taxes and spending.

The rift between the two men appears to stem from Musk’s insistence that far-right activist and anti-Islam crusader  Tommy Robinson should be freed from jail. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, is a former member of an openly fascist British political party who has served multiple terms in jail, including for fraud and contempt of court.

Both Farage and Starmer — who rarely agree on much — contend that Robinson’s use of Facebook Live and flouting a judge’s order by broadcasting banned details of a 2018 sex exploitation case in the community of Huddersfield nearly resulted in a mistrial.

Farage, who has been trying to moderate his Reform UK’s image to attract more Conservative supporters, has said courting Robinson could cause “immense harm” to his party. But Musk has tweeted Robinson deserves to be freed — and that Farage should be fired.

Starmer claps back

In one of his strongest public statements since he became prime minister this past summer, Starmer took aim at Musk on Tuesday, accusing the world’s richest man of spreading lies.

“I’m prepared to call out this for what it is. We’ve seen this playbook many times, whipping up intimidation and threats of violence, hoping that the media will amplify it,” said Starmer. “When the poison of the far right leads to serious threats to Jess Phillips and others, then in my book, a line has been crossed.”

Many in the U.K. also blamed Musk for inflaming tempers and inciting violence in the aftermath of the killings of three young people at a dance class in Southport, England, this summer. Musk reposted conspiracy theories from far-right accounts linking the incident to mass immigration, stating that “civil war” in the U.K. was inevitable. 

Just how much traction Musk’s interventions are getting with the British public is difficult to gauge. In the aftermath of Musk’s social media attacks, pollster YouGov reposted its latest poll from November, underscoring that at the time, Musk was unpopular with 64 per cent of the British public. 

On the other hand, the Labour Party may be concerned that Musk’s attacks — whether truthful or not — could nonetheless cause damage. 

A Labour cabinet minister appeared to respond to Musk’s recent accusations by announcing that people who fail to report child sexual abuse could face criminal prosecution as part of a new law to be introduced later in 2025 — one of the recommendations in Prof. Jay’s report.

For Starmer, and other European politicians, attacking Musk comes with risks, says Bale of Saint Mary’s.  

“They know that Musk is really close to Trump, and by offending Musk, they may well turn Trump against them.”

Published at Wed, 08 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Mediterranean claimed more than 2,200 migrant lives in 2024. Here’s why it could be worse this year

More than 2,200 people died or disappeared trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea last year, the United Nations says. With more European countries championing the success of far-right policies aimed at shutting out migrants, experts are warning even more lives could be lost in 2025 without real change.

As revellers rang in the new year around the globe, grim news emerged from the Mediterranean: A small boat travelling from Libya had sunk near the Italian island of Lampedusa, leaving only seven survivors, including an eight-year-old whose mother was among the more than 20 people reported missing.

It’s an all-too-common story in the region, where countless vessels carrying migrants attempt to cross the waters to Europe. Many never complete their journey. Nearly 1,700 people were killed or went missing in 2024 along the central Mediterranean route, which stretches from North Africa to Italy and Malta.

The deaths come after a year of increasing crackdowns on civilian rescue boats in the Mediterranean, as well as an attempt by Italy’s far-right government to pass asylum-seekers off to Albania.

Michael Gordon, a research fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ont., said non-governmental organizations doing search-and-rescue operations have become “an easy scapegoat” for authorities frustrated with the overflow of migrants.

“The result of this criminalization [is] … there are less assets out at sea assisting migrants in distress. And as a result, people will continue to die,” he said in an interview with CBC News.

More than 31,000 migrants have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a United Nations agency.

The death toll in 2024 includes “hundreds of children, who make up one in five of all people migrating through the Mediterranean,” Regina De Dominicis, UNICEF’s regional director for Europe and Central Asia and special co-ordinator for the refugee and migrant response in Europe, said in a statement last week. “The majority are fleeing violent conflict and poverty.”

‘Widespread criminalization’ of civilian rescue boats

Growing anti-immigration sentiment is making these crossings more dangerous, according to experts and human rights groups.

In 2023, Italy made it illegal for search-and-rescue NGOs to perform more than one rescue per trip, meaning ships would have to ignore any other distress calls they received, or risk massive fines and having their vessels detained.

In November, German non-governmental organization Sea-Watch filed a criminal complaint against the Italian authorities over a September shipwreck that killed 21 people, alleging it had alerted the Italian coast guard of a boat in distress but that a rescue vessel was not sent for two days.

Italian authorities also routinely assign distant ports for NGO rescue vessels. Last month, SOS Méditerranée, an international rescue organization, shared on social media that it was forced to travel more than 1,600 kilometres for several days to get 162 survivors to safety after Italian authorities ignored pleas for a closer port of entry.

“We have been sanctioned for simply fulfilling our legal duty to save lives,” Juan Matias Gil, a representative with Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders, said in a statement after its rescue vessel was issued a 60-day detention order in August.

This “widespread criminalization” of civilian rescue operations needlessly puts lives at risk, researcher Gordon, who also works with Wilfrid Laurier University’s International Migration Research Centre, said.

“I think that this is also very much tied to the rise of far-right governments in Europe.”

Migrant arrivals fall dramatically in Italy

The policies of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who was elected in 2022 on an anti-immigration platform, bore results for her government in 2024. Just over 66,000 migrants arrived in Italy by boat last year, down roughly 60 per cent from the 157,000 people who arrived in 2023, the country’s Interior Ministry reports.

The recorded number of deaths and disappearances in the Mediterranean — already a minimum estimate, as many boats vanish without a trace during the crossing — dropped by about 28 per cent in 2024 compared with the previous year, according to IOM data.

“The fact that we have fewer arrivals does not mean that we have fewer risks,” Nicola Dell’Arciprete, country co-ordinator of UNICEF’s migration and refugee response in Italy, told CBC News.

Dell’Arciprete has worked with children who fled war, extreme poverty or political upheaval. Many arrive with no parents or guardians.

“They’re really running from nightmares,” he said. “The factors that are pushing people towards Europe are not really changing.”

Minimizing migrant deaths requires more investment in reception centres, contingency plans for high-arrival periods, more safe and legal pathways for immigration and strengthened search-and-rescue operations, Dell’Arciprete said, adding that the question is whether there’s “political will to move along those lines.”

This year, European countries will be assessing their regulations to plan for the implementation of the new European Union pact on asylum and migration. The pact, the first update to Europe’s asylum laws in two decades, was agreed to in 2024 but won’t see full implementation until 2026.

EU pays countries for migrant control

Italy and the EU have largely focused on origin countries for migrant control. The EU delivered ten of millions of euros of aid to Tunisia in 2023 to boost border control and stop migrant boats from leaving its shores, and it penned a 7.4 billion euro deal ($11 billion Cdn) to bolster “stability” in Egypt, with a focus on migration control.

Meloni played a key role in securing the Tunisia deal, which is now largely credited with the drop in migrant arrivals in 2024, along with a similar deal Italy made with Libya in 2017.

Human rights groups have stated that returning migrants found at sea to Libya exposes them to torture and abuse under arbitrary detention.

Nevertheless, Italy’s immigration policies have received praise from other European leaders, such as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who in September commended Italy’s “remarkable progress.”

Italy’s latest tactic to reduce migrants fell on its face last fall, when Meloni made an agreement with Albania that would see up to 36,000 asylum-seekers sent directly to the non-EU country each year to await deportation, only for Italian courts to refuse to validate the transfer of migrants.

The plan is now stalled over disagreements about what constitutes a safe country, although Meloni vowed in December to continue the project.

Experts say that without meaningful change, tragedies in the Mediterranean will continue.

“Until we strengthen the search-and-rescue operations, until we create safe and legal pathways for children to travel to Europe, we are going to see more people dying,” Dell’Arciprete said. “And that is a simple fact.”

Published at Wed, 08 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000