German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his deputy, Robert Habeck, used their New Year addresses to castigate Elon Musk over his backing for a far-right party in February’s snap election.

Musk, a key adviser and major donor to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, has repeatedly praised the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany in recent weeks on his social media platform X. He expanded on his support for the party, known by its German acronym AfD, in an opinion piece published over the weekend by Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

Scholz, a center-left Social Democrat who Musk has regularly mocked, didn’t mention the South Africa-born entrepreneur by name but emphasized that the Feb. 23 ballot will be decided by German voters and not “by the owners of social media channels.”

“One can be forgiven for sometimes thinking that the more extreme an opinion is, the more attention it will garner,” Scholz said, according to the text of his address to be televised Tuesday evening.

“But it won’t be the person who yells loudest who will decide where Germany goes from here,” he added. “Rather, that will be up to the vast majority of reasonable and decent people.”

Habeck, who is running as the chancellor candidate for the Greens, accused Musk of seeking to weaken Europe as part of a bid to undermine regulations that impact his business empire.

“When Elon Musk — equipped not only with billions upon billions, but also with unbridled communication power — calls for the AfD to be elected in Germany, it is not out of ignorance of the AfD, it has logic and system,” Habeck said.

“A weak Europe is in the interests of those for whom regulation is an unreasonable limit to their power,” he added. “But there needs to be a limitation on power. No business model should be allowed to destroy our democracy.”

Scholz triggered the early election — seven months before the scheduled end of his four-year term — when he fired his finance minister in early November, effectively stripping himself of a majority in the lower house of parliament.

With less than two months until the vote, the main opposition conservatives under Friedrich Merz have a comfortable lead in opinion polls, with the AfD in second place and Scholz’s SPD party third.

Merz’s center-right CDU/CSU bloc has about 31% support, according to the latest Bloomberg polling average, with the AfD at around 20%, the SPD 17% and the Greens 12% in fourth.

Since it was founded in 2013, the AfD has moved progressively toward the extreme right, garnering increasing support among voters disillusioned with mainstream parties, particularly in the former communist eastern regions.

Three state chapters of the party in eastern Germany are officially classified as right-wing extremist and are under enhanced surveillance by the domestic intelligence services.

As well as seeking to drastically curb immigration, the AfD wants Germany to exit the European Union, cut aid to Ukraine and restore ties with Russia.

Despite its rising support, the chances of it getting into government at the federal level remain close to zero as all other parties refuse to cooperate with it.

Germany’s head of state, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, has also chided Musk over his expressions of support for the AfD.

In a statement last week confirming the election date, Steinmeier warned about the threat of external interference in the democratic process, be it “covert, as was evidently the case recently during the elections in Romania, or open and blatant, as is currently being practiced particularly intensively on the X platform.”

Habeck, who is also the economy minister, said that to thwart efforts to undermine it, the EU must fight back by exploiting “the power of the world’s largest single market.”

“Anyone who wants to weaken us must be met with strength,” he said in his address. “To achieve this, the European Union must look less inward and more outward.”

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