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The co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany has called for mass deportations of migrants as the party launches its program for next month’s national election.
In a fiery speech to supporters in the small town of Riesa in Saxony, East Germany, Alice Weidel said that under the AfD – which is second in the polls with a record share of the vote of around 20 percent – Germany would witness “repatriations to one on a large scale”.
Weidel, the AfD’s candidate for chancellor in the election, used the controversial term “emigration” to describe the policy.
The word was coined by Austrian right-wing ideologue Martin Sellner, who defines “immigration” as the forced removal of immigrants who break the law or “refuse to integrate”, regardless of their citizenship status – an idea critics say it is similar to ethnic cleansing.
On Saturday, Weidel said: “I have to tell you honestly: if it’s called re-immigration, then it’s called re-immigration.”
She was met with thunderous applause from party delegates, who also repeatedly chanted “Alice für Deutschland” – a play on the banned Nazi-era slogan “Alles für Deutschland”, meaning “all for Germany”.
Weidel, a former Goldman Sachs analyst, has positioned herself as the most visible face of a party that includes ultra-radicals who have been classified as right-wing extremists by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency.
Earlier this week in a joint appearance at X with Elon Musk, Weidel used an unprecedented public platform to argue that the AfD — which also promotes normalizing relations with Moscow and dismantling wind turbines — had become a major political force. .
However, she has little chance of coming to power in the next election, because all of Germany’s other major parties have ruled out entering into a coalition with her.
Weidel’s embrace of re-immigration was seen by some in the party as a nod to Björn Höcke, the far-right standard-bearer who led the AfD to a historic first place in regional elections in the eastern German state of Thuringia in September.
“It’s a concession to Björn Höcke,” said Kay Gottschalk, a member of the German Bundestag who belongs to the party’s more moderate wing. “It’s a word, of course. I would put it another way – bringing them back – but that’s what the delegates want.”
Weidel also used her speech to reiterate her call for the Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany to be reinstated, to restore nuclear power and oppose gender studies programs.
The party meeting was met with huge protests. About 10,000 anti-AfD demonstrators showed up and police placed Riesa, a town of 30,000, under lockdown, delaying the start of the conference by two hours.
