Alice Weidel could not have hoped for a better backdrop for her coronation as chancellor candidate for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
Fresh from the much promoted online chat New fan of Elon MuskShe thanked the CEO of Tesla and an ally of incoming US President Donald Trump for his willingness to broadcast the AfD party conference live on his social media platform X.
“Freedom of expression!” She announced in English, before setting off Fiery anti-immigration speech At the rally in the small eastern German town of Riesa this weekend.
Weidel's courtship of the world's richest man is part of an attempt to capitalize on the global populist wave that propelled far-right Giorgia Meloni to power in Italy in 2022, and Marine Le Pen's National Rally party to a first-round victory in last summer's French election. Trump was re-elected in November.
Senior AfD members were excited about the far right A historic achievement in AustriaLast week, the leader of the Freedom Party was given the opportunity to form a government.
“It is part of a radical transformation in Western democracies,” said Andreas Röder, a historian at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. “The pendulum is moving to the right and this is what the AfD has linked itself to.”
In Germany, the party has already achieved a series of historic successes. He came second in the European elections last June, and last fall won as much as 33% of the regional vote in a strong showing in three eastern states – including Saxony, where Riesa is located – even after allegations of links between… Senior members of the party and the PKK. Russian and Chinese espionage.
Opinion polls now indicate that the AfD – which attacks Muslims, attacks “woke” culture and wants sanctions on Russia lifted – is on track to finish second for the first time ever in the February 23 federal election with a record 20 percent. of votes. vote.
Weidel, 45, does not fit the stereotype of a right-wing extremist. She is married to the Swiss film producer Sarah Bussard, who was born in Sri Lanka, and lives with her and their two adopted children in Switzerland. After graduating, she spent some time as an analyst at Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt, and later wrote a doctoral thesis on China's 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 attach great importance to avoiding repeating the mistakes that led to its dark Nazi past. During smiling TV interviews or in videos posted to TikTok, her appearance is often deliberately softer than some of the far-right extremists in her party.
But there was little of her bright side during her rousing 20-minute speech in Rize, where she appealed to party supporters by criticizing the “leftist mob” of protesters who delayed the start of the conference by two hours.
She has embraced the highly charged term “remigration”, promising “large-scale deportation of migrants” and criticizing a series of attacks in recent years by migrants and asylum seekers.
Many saw its inflammatory language as a concession to controversial leader Björn Höcke, who led the party to victory in regional elections in the eastern state of Thuringia last September and who was condemned for evoking the nationalist language used by Adolf Hitler's stormtroopers.
In the party's latest attempt to reference the Nazi era without falling foul of the law, the head of another regional party encouraged the crowd to chant “Alice für Deutschland” – a pun on the banned slogan “Alles für Deutschland”, meaning “Everything for”. Germany”.
Those who knew Weidel during her time in finance two decades ago struggle to reconcile that woman with today's far-right leader.
She did not display any right-wing views at the time, said Jim Dilworth, an American banker who lives in Germany and worked with her at Goldman and then at Allianz Global Investors. “The most extreme thing about her views is her skepticism of 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 20 years” to make the same progress in the more center-right Christian Democrats. “That's the whole reason she was chosen for this party. I think there was a lot of opportunism there.”
The AfD co-leader denied making such statements. “I never said that. It doesn't make any sense,” she told the Financial Times through a spokesperson. “No one, certainly not at that time, joins the AfD for the sake of their career.”
Weidel's political persona is a carefully controlled conservative. She wears soft white shirts, often studded with pearls, and her hair is in an elegant low bun. She says her party is not far-right but conservative liberal.
When asked to explain the apparent contradiction between her private life and her party's opposition to “gender and woke ideology” in 2023, she said: “I'm not gay. 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 biologically, but not in terms of political conviction.”
Kay Gottschalk, an AfD MP who first met Weidel around the time she joined the national executive committee in 2015, said she was “ideal” for reaching out to groups where the party had traditionally not done well, including Women voters.
Its critics warn that it is a work. Co-leader of the ruling Social Democratic Party, Lars Klingbeil, described her as a “wolf in sheep's clothing.”
Analysts and even some of her allies within the AfD argue that even as 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 dissatisfaction with Angela Merkel's 2015 decision to welcome nearly a million migrants and asylum seekers helped the AfD expand from its origins in 2013 as a single-issue party opposed to the euro.
The sharp decline in the popularity of the tripartite “traffic light” coalition led by Social Democratic Party Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Which collapsed in NovemberHe also played a vital role in sending new voters to the AfD. So do lukewarm attitudes toward the election's front-runner, Christian Democratic Party leader Friedrich Merz, as well as widespread concern about Germany's stagnant economy and the future of the country's manufacturing industry.
“The dissatisfaction with other parties is enormous,” a senior AfD official said. “We take advantage of that.”
However, Weidel, who has been co-leader of the AfD since 2019, has proven to be a survivor in a group notorious for infighting. Insiders say she was adept at running the party's radical wing.
No matter how well it performs, the party has almost no hope of seizing power in Berlin after next month's elections because of a “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 set of elections, scheduled for 2029, where they are hoping for more voter disillusionment — taking inspiration in particular from Austria's Herbert Kickl, who was asked by the country's president last week to form a government after attempts by the government. The centrist parties failed to exclude the Freedom Party.
“It seems like a pattern, and they're exploiting it,” historian Rudder said. “They point to Austria and say: 'It's Germany in four years.'”
