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 much-hyped online chat with young fan Elon Musk, she thanked the Tesla chief executive and ally of incoming US president Donald Trump for his willingness to live stream the AfD conference on his platform. X social media.
“Freedom of speech!” she announced in English, before launching into a fiery anti-immigration speech at the rally in the small East German town of Riesa this weekend.
Weidel’s connection to the world’s richest man is part of a bid to ride a global populist wave that propelled far-right Giorgia Meloni to power in Italy in 2022, rallying Marine Le Pen’s national side to a first-round victory in the French elections last summer. and delivered Trump’s re-election in November.
Senior members of the AfD party were also excited about the far-right’s historic advance in Austria, where the leader of the Freedom party was given the chance last week to form a government.
“It’s part of a tectonic shift in Western democracies,” said Andreas Rödder, a historian at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. “The pendulum is swinging to the right and that’s what the AfD is associated with.”
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In Germany, the party has already secured a string of historic successes. She came second in European elections in June and last autumn won up to 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 members of party and Russian and Chinese Espionage.
Polls now suggest that the AfD – which opposes Muslims, opposes “woke” culture and wants to lift sanctions on Russia – is on track to win its second ever first-ever second place in the February 23 federal election with a record 20 percent to vote.
Weidel, 45, does not fit the stereotype of a right-wing radical. She is married to Sri Lankan-born Swiss film producer Sarah Bossard, with whom she lives together with their two adopted children in Switzerland. After graduation, she spent time as an analyst for Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt and later wrote a doctoral thesis on the Chinese pension system.
Analysts see Weidel as an attempt by the party to present a more palatable face to the public in a country where many still place great importance on avoiding repeating the mistakes that led to its dark Nazi past. During smiling TV 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 lighter side appeared during her 20-minute speech in Riesa, where she appealed to the party faithful by lashing out at the “leftist mob” of protesters who delayed the start of the conference by two hours.
She embraced the highly charged term “immigration” after promising “large-scale deportations of migrants” and railed against a series of attacks in recent years by migrants and asylum seekers.
Many saw her inflammatory language as a concession to firebrand Björn Höcke, who led the party to victory in regional elections in the eastern state of Thuringia in September and has been condemned for invoking the nationalist language of Adolf Hitler’s storm troops.
In the party’s latest attempt to refer to 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”, which means “anything for Germany”.
Those who knew Weidel during her tenure in finance two decades ago struggle to reconcile that woman with today’s far-right leader.
Jim Dilworth, an American banker living in Germany who worked with her at Goldman and later Allianz Global Investors, said she did not display any right-wing views at the time. “The most ‘radical’ thing about her views was her skepticism about the euro as a single 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 more centre-right Christian Democrats. “So that’s basically why she chose this party. I think there was a lot of opportunism there.”
The AfD co-leader denied making such a comment. She told the Financial Times through a spokesperson: “I never said that. It doesn’t make sense. No one, and certainly not at that time, joined the AfD for the sake of their career.”
Weidel’s political persona is one of carefully controlled conservatism. She wears crisp white shirts, often with pearls, and her hair in a neat bun. She argues that her party is not right-wing extremist, but rather conservative liberal.
Asked to explain the apparent discrepancy between her private life and her party’s opposition to “smart gender and ideology” in 2023, she said: “I’m not queer. I just got married to a woman I’ve known for 20 years.” Or, as one senior party official put it: “She’s just gay 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” to reach out to groups where the party has traditionally not performed, including women voters.
Her critics warn that it is an act. The co-leader of the ruling Social Democrats, Lars Klingbeil, has described him as “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”.
Analysts and even some of her allies within the AfD argue that, even though 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 welcome around 1 million migrants and asylum seekers helped the AfD expand from its origins in 2013 as a single-issue anti-euro party.
The deep unpopularity of SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s “traffic light” tripartite coalition, which collapsed in November, has also been vital in sending new voters to the AfD. There are also tepid attitudes toward the election’s front-runner, Christian Democrat leader Friedrich Merz, as well as widespread anxiety about Germany’s stagnant economy and the future of the country’s manufacturing industry.
“Dissatisfaction with other parties is huge,” said a senior AfD official. “We’re taking advantage of that.”
Yet Weidel, who has been co-leader of the AfD since 2019, has also proven to be a survivor in an outfit known for infighting. Insiders say she has been adept at managing the party’s radical wing.
Regardless of how well it performs, the party has little hope of taking power in Berlin after next month’s vote because of the “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 stronger showing could force other parties to drop their resistance to cooperating. They take particular inspiration from Austria’s Herbert Kickl, who last week was asked by the country’s president to form a government after efforts by centrist parties to form a coalition excluding his Freedom party failed.
“It looks like a pattern and they’re exploiting it,” said Rödder, the historian. “They are pointing to Austria to say: ‘It’s Germany in four years.’
