Alice Weidel could not have asked for a better backdrop for her coronation as chancellor candidate of the far-right Alternative for Germany.
Fresh from a high-profile online chat with new fan Elon Musk, she thanked the Tesla CEO and ally of new US President Donald Trump for his willingness to livestream the AfD conference on his media platform social
“Freedom of expression!” “” she proclaimed in English, before launching into a fiery anti-immigration speech at the rally held this weekend in the small town of Riesa in East Germany.
Weidel’s courting of the world’s richest man is part of an effort to tap into a global populist wave that has propelled far-right Giorgia Meloni to power in Italy in 2022, and the Marine Le Pen’s national rally to victory in the first round of last summer’s French elections. and secured Trump’s re-election in November.
Senior AfD officials were also enthusiastic about the far-right’s historic breakthrough in Austria, where the leader of the Freedom Party was last week given the chance to form a government.
“This is part of a tectonic shift in Western democracies,” said Andreas Rödder, a historian at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. “The pendulum is swinging to the right and that’s what the AfD is committed to.”
In Germany, the party has already achieved a series of historic successes. He came second in June’s European elections and won as much as 33 percent of the regional vote last fall, a strong performance in three eastern states – including Saxony, where Riesa is located – even after allegations of links between senior party members and Russian and Chinese espionage.
Polls now suggest the AfD – which attacks Muslims, castigates “woke” culture and wants to lift sanctions on Russia – is on track to win its second-place finish for the first time in the February 23 federal election with a record 20 percent of the vote. vote.
Weidel, 45, does not fit the stereotype of a right-wing radical. She is married to the Swiss film producer of Sri Lankan origin Sarah Bossard, with whom she lives with their two adopted children in Switzerland. After graduating, she worked 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 acceptable 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. In smiling television interviews or in videos posted on TikTok, his appearance is often deliberately softer than that of some far-right radicals in his party.
But her lighter side was not on display during her 20-minute speech in Riesa, where she appealed to the party faithful by lambasting the “left-wing crowd” of protesters who delayed the start of the march by two hours. the conference.
She adopted the loaded term “remigration,” promising “large-scale expulsions of immigrants” and denouncing a series of attacks in recent years by migrants and asylum seekers.
Many saw his 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 who was condemned for invoking the nationalist language of Adolf Hitler’s storm troopers.
In the party’s latest attempt to reference the Nazi era without breaking the law, another regional party leader 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 tenure in finance twenty years ago find it difficult to reconcile this woman with today’s far-right leader.
Jim Dilworth, an American banker living in Germany who worked with her at Goldman and then at Allianz Global Investors, said she did not display any right-wing views at the time. “The most ‘radical’ thing about his views was his 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 that “it would take me 20 years” to make the same progress within the more center-based Christian Democrats. -right. “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 remark. She told the Financial Times through a spokesperson: “I never said that. This doesn’t make any sense. No one, certainly not at the time, joined the AfD for the sake of their career.”
Weidel’s political personality is one of carefully controlled conservatism. She wears crisp white shirts, often with pearls, and her hair is styled in a low bun. She says her party is not far-right but rather liberal-conservative.
When asked to explain the apparent incongruity between her private life and her party’s opposition to “gender and woke ideology” in 2023, she replied: “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 lawmaker who first met Weidel when she joined the national executive committee in 2015, said she was “perfect” to reach out to groups where the party had no traditionally not been successful, including female voters.
His detractors warn that it is an act. The co-leader of the ruling Social Democrats, Lars Klingbeil, called her a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”.
Analysts and even some of his own allies within the AfD say that while the party appears poised to double its support from the 10% it achieved in the last federal election in 2021, Weidel cannot afford to do so. attribute only one part.
Deep public dissatisfaction with Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to welcome around a million migrants and asylum seekers has helped the AfD grow since its beginnings in 2013 as a single party opposed to the ‘euro.
The deep unpopularity of SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-way “traffic light” coalition, which collapsed in November, was also crucial in attracting new voters to the AfD. So are lukewarm attitudes toward the leading candidate, Christian Democratic leader Friedrich Merz, as well as widespread concern about the stagnation of the German economy and the future of manufacturing industry of the country.
“The dissatisfaction with other parties is enormous,” said a senior AfD official. “We’re enjoying it.”
Yet Weidel, co-leader of the AfD since 2019, has also proven himself to be a survivor within a group known for its infighting. Insiders say she has been adept at managing the party’s radical flank.
Regardless of its performance, the party has virtually no hope of taking power in Berlin after next month’s vote due to the “firewall” erected by Germany’s main parties, all of which have ruled out forming a coalition with the AfD.
But its officials are already looking ahead to the next election, scheduled for 2029, where they hope an even stronger showing could force other parties to abandon their resistance to cooperation. They are particularly inspired by the Austrian Herbert Kickl, whom the country’s president asked last week to form a government after the failure of attempts by centrist parties to form a coalition excluding his Freedom Party.
“It looks like a pattern and they are exploiting it,” said historian Rödder. “They point to Austria to say: ‘It’s Germany in four years’.”
