Summary
Tesla’s European sales are plummeting, with Germany seeing a 60% drop despite strong EV growth. Similar declines hit Norway, Sweden, and France.
While some blame the Osborne effect—buyers delaying purchases for a refreshed Model Y—Musk’s endorsement of Germany’s far-right AfD may also be repelling customers.
Online backlash has linked Tesla to fascist imagery. In contrast, UK sales fell only 7.8%, suggesting political factors play a role.
With strong domestic EV competition in Europe, Tesla’s reputation crisis could further hurt demand.
Weirdly though while that is still very much an authotarian system, it will always be a hard break on any too unhinged ideas of populism. It simply is not in the interest of the Elite.
That isn’t meant to be an excuse, but it will mostly prevent the hateful or ignorant to grasp the majority of power and change the state beyond the point of no return. The point we fear might be passed soon in the USA, as well as Italy, Germany, Austria and all other countries where the far-right populists are on the rise, without being kept in check
I think Brexit disproves all that.
I’ve lived in Portugal, The Netherlands, Britain and Germany and the most unhinged ideas of populism I ever saw upclose which were the most widespread amongst the population, were in Britain during the Leave Referendum and afterwards - the same unhinged Racism of the Far Right all over Continental Europe which at the time had less than 20% overall support, in Britain yielded to the Leave faction of the Tory Party one referendum and two Parliamentary Elections and would’ve won them a 3rd one if the Populist Rightwing vote hadn’t been split due to the rise of the (even more unhinged) Reform UK party and a First Past The Post system that turned that split vote into lots of constituency losses (to the point that Labour got 64% of MPs on only 34% of votes cast).
Don’t confuse the quality of image management that results from the training most British Politicians got as children in very expensive and very posh private schools, with them not being populist - somebody like Boris Johnson was spreading the same kind of ideas as Trump, Orban or the Far-Right in the rest or Europe, he was just much smoother at it, mostly because whilst for example in the US the idea of “important person” is somebody who is loud, cares not about manners and sounds confident, in Britain it’s somebody who is posh, has soft upper class accent and sounds confident, so populist leaders in Britain, being well adapted to local prejudices, project a different image than the loud and brutish common abroad, whilst defending the very same ideas.