Elon Musk made a phone call to the leader of Germany’s far right party, Alice Weidel and gave her his congratulations for the party’s second place win in Germany’s election. 

The AfD was considered a fringe party for years. Even now there’s debate on whether the party should be allowed to exist due to some extremist views. Still, with a 20.8% popular vote, voters seem to be changing their minds. That’s about double the votes the AfD usually gets.  

In the German government, second doesn’t mean losing. Any party that gets more than 5% of the popular vote is guaranteed seats in parliament, with each party getting seats proportional to the number of votes they received. With only around an 8% difference between the AfD and the CSU/CDU, the winning party, power is evenly distributed between the two parties. 

Generally, when power is split like this, the two strongest parties form a coalition to achieve both their goals. The CSU/CDU aren’t willing to form a coalition with AfD though, hoping to “firewall” them out of parliamentary decisions through cooperation with other parties.