Alice Weidel could not have hoped for a better backdrop for her coronation as chancellor candidate of the far-right Alternative for Germany.
Fresh from a heated internet conversation with new Elon Musk fanshe thanked the Tesla CEO and ally of incoming US President Donald Trump for his willingness to live stream the AfD conference on his X social media platform.
“Freedom of speech!” she stated in English before walking off fiery speech against immigration at a gathering in the small East German town of Riesa this weekend.
Weidel’s wooing of the world’s richest man is part of an effort to tackle the global populist wave that brought hard-right Giorgio Meloni to power in Italy in 2022, Marine Le Pen’s National Assembly to a first-round victory in French elections last summer and brought Trump re-election in November.
Senior members of the AfD party were also bursting with far-right excitement a historic breakthrough in Austriawhere the Freedom Party leader got the chance to form a government last week.
“It’s part of a tectonic shift in Western democracies,” said Andreas Rödder, a historian at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. “The pendulum is moving to the right and that’s what the AfD has become associated with.”
At home in Germany, the party has already secured a number of historic successes. It came second in June’s European elections and last autumn won as much as 33 percent of the regional vote in a strong showing in three eastern states – including Saxony, where Riesa is based – even after allegations of ties between senior party members and Russia and China espionage.
Polls now show the AfD — which rails against Muslims, rails against an “awakened” culture and wants to lift sanctions on Russia — on course to win its first second place in the February 23 federal election with a record 20 percent of the vote. voting.
Weidel, 45, does not fit the stereotype of a right-wing radical. She is married to the Swiss film producer Sarah Bossard, born in Sri Lanka, with whom she lives together with their two adopted children in Switzerland. After graduation, she spent some time as an analyst for Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt, and later wrote a doctoral thesis on the Chinese pension system.
Analysts see Weidel as the party’s attempt to present a more acceptable face to the public in a country where many still place great importance on avoiding repeating the mistakes that led to the dark Nazi past. During smiling television interviews or in videos posted on TikTok, her appearance is often deliberately softer than some of the ultra-right radicals in her party.
But little of her brighter side was visible during her 20-minute speech in Riesa, where she appealed to the party faithful by criticizing the “leftist crowd” of protesters who delayed the start of the conference by two hours.
She embraced the highly charged notion of “remigration” while promising “large-scale deportations of immigrants” and railed against a series of attacks on migrants and asylum seekers in recent years.
Many saw her incendiary language as a concession to the fiery Björn Höcke, who led the party to victory in regional elections in the eastern state of Thuringia in September and was condemned for invoking the nationalist language of Adolf Hitler’s stormtroopers.
In the party’s latest attempt to look back on the Nazi era without falling foul of the law, another regional party chief encouraged the crowd to chant “Alice für Deutschland” – a pun on the banned slogan “Alles für Deutschland”, meaning “all for Germany”.
Those who knew Weidel during her involvement in finance two decades ago are struggling to reconcile the woman with today’s far-right leader.
Jim Dilworth, an American banker living in Germany who worked with her at Goldman and later at Allianz Global Investors, said she had no right-wing views at the time. “The most radical thing about her views was her skepticism about the euro as a common currency,” he said.
Dilworth added that when he later expressed surprise at her decision to join the AfD, she told him “it would take me 20 years” to make the same progress in the center-right Christian Democrats. “So that’s actually why she chose this party. I think there was a lot of opportunism there.”
The AfD co-leader denied making such a remark. She told the Financial Times through a spokesperson: “I never said that. It doesn’t make sense. No one, especially not then, joined the AfD because of their career.”
Weidel’s political personality is one of carefully controlled conservatism. She wears clean white shirts, often with pearls, and her hair is tied in a neat low bun. She claims that her party is not right-wing extremist, but conservatively liberal.
Asked to explain the apparent discrepancy between her private life and her party’s opposition to the “gender and awakened ideology” of 2023, she said: “I’m not queer. I’m just married to a woman I’ve known for 20 years.” Or, as one senior party official put it: “She is gay only by biology, but not by political conviction.”
Kay Gottschalk, an AfD member of parliament who first met Weidel around the time she joined the national executive committee in 2015, said she was “perfect” for reaching out to groups where the party has traditionally failed, including women voters.
Her critics warn that it is an act. Co-leader of the ruling Social Democrats, Lars Klingbeil, described her as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”.
Analysts and even some of her own allies within the AfD argue that while the party looks set to double its support from 10 percent in the last federal election in 2021, Weidel can only take part of the credit.
Deep public discontent with Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to take in around one million migrants and asylum seekers has helped the AfD expand from its beginnings in 2013 as a single-issue anti-euro party.
The deep unpopularity of the tripartite “traffic light” coalition of SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz, which collapsed in Novemberit was also vital in sending new voters to the AfD. They also have lukewarm attitudes toward the pre-election favorite, Christian Democrat leader Friedrich Merz, as well as widespread anxiety about Germany’s stagnant economy and the future of the country’s manufacturing industry.
“The dissatisfaction with the other parties is huge,” said a senior AfD official. “We profit from it.”
Still, Weidel, who has co-led the AfD since 2019, has also proven to be a survivor in a group known for infighting. Insiders say that she was skilled in managing the radical side of the party.
Regardless of how well it does, the party has little hope of taking power in Berlin after next month’s vote because of a “firewall” erected by Germany’s main parties, which have all ruled out forming a coalition with the AfD.
But its officials are already eyeing the next election, scheduled for 2029, when they hope an even better result could force other parties to drop their resistance to cooperation. They are particularly inspired by Austria’s Herbert Kickl, who was asked by the country’s president last week to form a government after attempts by centrist parties to form a coalition that excluded his Freedom Party failed.
“It looks like a pattern, and they’re exploiting it,” said Rödder, the historian. “They point to Austria to say, ‘That’s Germany in four years.'”