BERLIN, Jan 9 (Reuters) - On his public journey to

embracing Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD),

Elon Musk has frequently amplified the online content of one

young supporter of the party - climate change and COVID-19

lockdown sceptic Naomi Seibt.

Shortly after polls closed in June for the European

Parliament elections, in which the AfD performed strongly, Seibt

announced that she had voted for the party in a post to her tens

of thousands of followers on X, Musk's social media platform. An

hour later, Musk responded with a question.

"Why is there such a negative reaction from some about AfD?"

the Tesla chief executive asked in a public reply. He followed

up with a private message asking for more details, Seibt told

Reuters in an interview. Reuters has not seen the private

message.

"I explained to him the AfD is not similar to the Nazi

ideology or Hitler, but is like the 19th century liberal

nationalist movement ... because they wanted to be free from

authoritarians in their own territory," said the 24-year-old,

who posts in English, describing their private exchange.

The billionaire entrepreneur responded with a humorous Roman

Empire-themed meme, said Seibt, who has around 368,000 followers

on X.

Since asking Seibt about the AfD in June, Musk has engaged

publicly with the self-professed libertarian more than 40 times,

following two previous engagements with her on the platform

earlier that year, putting her among a small group of European

influencers whose content he has heavily interacted with in

recent months, according to a Reuters review of his posts on X.

Musk, who has more than 211 million followers on the

platform, did not respond to requests for comment for this

story. Reuters could not establish how influential Seibt's

content has been on his thinking.

Seibt, who rose to prominence several years ago posting

content to counter climate activist Greta Thunberg, said Musk

has sent her a handful direct messages asking about German

politics in the same period. Reuters has not seen these posts.

By December, Musk's public support for the AfD was explicit,

with his public posts saying the party would "save" Germany.

Later on Thursday, he plans to interview on X Alice Weidel, the

party's leader and candidate to be Germany's chancellor in

general elections scheduled for Feb. 23.

The AfD contains a range of conservative ideologies. It is

running second in polls ahead of the elections, called after the

collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's three-way coalition.

Mainstream parties have said they will not work with the party,

founded in 2013 and classified by Germany's domestic security

service as a "suspected extremist organisation."

In recent years, the AfD consolidated around a populist

anti-Islam worldview opposed to immigration. It wants to

dissolve the EU and replace it with a looser trade bloc, and to

stop arming Ukraine.

It is also focused on ending Germany's policy of atonement

for World War Two crimes. Its leading candidate for the European

Parliament election resigned from the party in May amid public

outcry, after declaring that members of the SS, the Nazis' main

paramilitary force, were "not all criminals".

Ned Richardson-Little, a historian at the Leibniz Centre for

Contemporary History Potsdam, said that while they were

historically different parties, the AfD did share with the Nazis

"a focus on recapturing a mythical lost glory of the German

nation" while scapegoating minorities and railing against

elites.

Germany's weak economy together with anxiety over

immigration and war in Europe has tainted voters' view of

mainstream parties, helping the AfD's standings in the polls.

The AfD did not respond to a request for comment.

Musk's public interest in German and British politics has

intensified since the November U.S. election, in which he spent

quarter of a billion dollars to help Donald Trump return to the

White House.

Musk has made no secret of his desire to see a similar

shakeup of the political order across Europe, provoking outrage

from some leaders across the continent, including in Germany

where he has a car factory that employs thousands.

Reuters could not establish to what extent he is acting at

the behest of Trump, who has appointed him the joint head of a

new government efficiency department. On Tuesday, the

president-elect said "Elon's doing a good job" when asked for

his reaction to Musk's statements about foreign affairs in

Europe and elsewhere.

"DON'T SOUND EXTREMIST"

The first Musk post that Reuters could find containing a

mention of the AdD came in September 2023, when he retweeted a

post from an Italian far-right media outlet that talked

favourably about the party. After an online backlash, two days

after that he posted that he personally didn't support any party

and didn't know the AfD "from a hole in the ground."

According to a review of subsequent posts on the platform,

Musk doesn't appear to have mentioned the AfD again until his

June 9 reply to Seibt's post declaring her vote for the party,

in which he said he had been reading up, and that the party's

policies "don't sound extremist."

Six months later, his views had crystallized.

Between June and December, Musk mentioned the AfD twice in

tweets, relating to an attempt in Germany to ban the party.

Then, on Dec. 20, Musk posted again, responding to Seibt,

and said: "Only the AfD can save Germany."

The post retweeted a video by Seibt, in which she pilloried

the German election frontrunner Friedrich Merz for criticising

Musk.

The post was on the same day as a car-ramming attack that

killed six at a Christmas market, carried out by a Saudi-born

man with strong anti-Islam views who expressed support for the

AfD and Musk in online messages but whose motives remain

unclear.

Since the Dec. 20 post, Musk has mentioned the AfD by name

at least six times in tweets and has interacted with Seibt more

than a dozen times on the platform, mainly about German

politics.

Later in December, he doubled down on support for the AfD in

a column in a German newspaper, saying it was wrong to call it

far-right or compare it to Hitler, because Weidel, the party's

Mandarin-speaking leader, is raising children with a same sex

partner born in Sri Lanka.

Seibt told Reuters that based on their conversations, she

believed that when Musk asked about the AfD on X he had already

researched the issue. "That's not something that's come from

nowhere," she said.

His embrace of the AfD has coincided with a series of

attacks on Brtain's government and support for increasingly

fringe members of that country's right-wing.

Over the past weeks, he has reignited debate around a

British child sex scandal, calling a female minister an

apologist for "rape genocide" against white girls and picking a

fight with his recent ally Nigel Farage over Musk's support for

imprisoned hard-right leader Tommy Robinson.

"ERADICATE GERMAN GUILT"

Seibt's posts often match Musk's talking points, including

in recent days the support for Robinson. Her videos are peppered

with praise for X along with a catchphrase popular with Musk -

"the woke mind virus."

In two posts on X this week about the British child sex

scandal, resurfaced by Musk's attacks on the Labour government

and his support for Robinson, Seibt said she had been a victim

of sexual abuse and grooming as a child. Reuters has not

verified those comments.

Seibt says she is not far-right but votes for the AfD so

that it can tackle immigration.

"I want to eradicate all this German guilt," she added,

referring to the German culture of atonement for Nazi crimes,

including the Holocaust of Europe's Jews. "I didn't do anything

that allegedly my ancestors did," she said.

Seibt is currently travelling in the U.S. in the run-up to

Trump's Jan. 20 inauguration, crashing at the homes of other

political influencers on X, she said.

She hopes to attend inauguration as the "plus one" of

another influencer, Nick Sortor, she said. There, she hopes to

finally meet Musk in person. Trump's transition team and Sortor

did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Seibt has been a prominent figure in right-wing social media

since her schooldays in the German university town of Muenster.

As a child she was plagued by ill-health and never knew her

father, she said.

Seibt has dedicated herself to online activism since

dropping out of university after one semester of economics, she

said.

In 2019, she met British climate sceptic Christopher

Monckton who connected her with the Heartland Institute, a

U.S.-based think tank that has worked on climate change denial

and cast doubt on the harm caused by passive smoking.

Heartland paid her $4,000 a month for three months, in what

she described as a scholarship, she said. Heartland did not

respond to a request for comment.

Musk's takeover of X has helped elevate her profile.

"When I saw in 2022 that Twitter was being bought by Elon, I

didn't know what was going to happen," she said. "But I knew one

thing: I could trust this Elon Musk guy."