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.
Having lived in a couple of countries in Europe, including a decade in Britain, I would say the UK is one of the most Fascist countries in Europe (for example having a citizen surveillance system even more extreme than the US and Press censorship in the form of D-Noticies), though elites there are extremelly good at being subtle and posh about it so the will keep up appearences: you won’t see goose stepping on the streets but for example in peaceful demonstrations the police will charge the crowd and News will report that - by showing the footage in the inverse order - as people first charging the police who then responded to it and you won’t see an overt Secret Police but once in a while out pops a leak of a special group within the normal police infiltrated Ecologist groups with undercover police officers (which came out because some female Ecologists ended up pregnant) or how their surveillance organisation kept Greenparty leaders under surveillance.
Back during the Nazi times the British elites were even pro-Nazi (there’s a picture of Queen Elizabeth as a child being taught by her uncle - then King - to do a Nazi salute) and it was only the Nazi invasion of Belgium that changed their minds, so geopolitics rather than a dislike of the Nazi ideology of ethnic superiority (notice how over the years British elites kept supporting white colonialism and their violence, from Appartheid South Africa to Genocide Israel). More in general, the elites over there (which are overwhelmingly dynastic in nature, and I don’t mean just the Royal Family) are strong believers in their own inherent superiority over others as justification for their wealth, so the whole ubermenschen and untermenschen thinking applied along class lines rather than just races (but races too: Brits tend to believe themselves superior to just about all foreigners but Americans and for example some of the most celebrated heroes of Britain - such as Churchill - actually ordered the execution of Genocides in the British Empire possessions).
All this to say that to me, having lived over there for a decade, the British’s minimal response to Fascism compared to the rest of Europe isn’t surprising - they live in a Society than in many ways runs along similar molds, harbours similar ideations about the inherent worth of people and is (including the Press) controled by elites who mostly are the same families that supported Nazism before Hitler invaded Belgium.
Most of Europe was okayish with the Nazi to be fair. We would evn turn away Jewish refugees before the war. Let’s be clear that WW2 didn’t happen because of the Genocides but only because of the invasions of other countries. The UK is not special in that regard.
My impression from living there is that the UK never ditched the mindset that some people are born inherently superior to others, and that’s both for different parts of British society along the axis of class (and in many cases also the different nations of the UK, with the English often seeing themselves as superior) and towards foreigners (Brexit did not happen in a vacuum).
I have the theory that is because the UK never really had a Revolution started from below (the closest they had were the Barons rebeling against the King leading to the Magna Carta or the Catholic-vs-Protestant fighting which was mainly different factions of the elites re-approportioning power) or Occupation by a foreign power that crushed the existing elites and loosened their power over the entire system, hence the established elites never really changed and thus the power structures in Britain, who those structures serve and who controls them, has changed a lot less over the last couple of centuries than elsewhere in Europe.
They’re not as much Fascists in a traditional sense but more a continuation of a Monarchic semi-Autocratic system were the power of the King was weakenned centuries ago and divided amongst the rest of the Landowner Class and later the Trading Burgeoisie without really reaching the lower classes in full (the closest to it ever happenning was post-War Britain and that has been reverted in the last 4 decades).
Fascism in Europe one of the reactions to Republicanism, but the UK never had a Republican phase and so a lot of the ideas on power and the worth of people in Fascism which are really just re-hashed monarchic thinking on who are the proper rulers and justifying it are still present in the British system in their natural (though more sophisticated in means and appearence) form.
All this to say that, yeah, I agree with you, it’s just that I don’t think their love for the Nazi ideology back then was quite driven by the same reasons as many other countries in Europe (though remember how even in Germany the Nazis had some support from the Monarchics) and that whilst elsewhere in Europe the elites that held such thinking were dethroned, in Britain they held on to power to the present day.
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.