Many people remember the early Alice Weidel as standing up indignantly during a speech by SPD MP Johannes Kahrs and stamping her left foot like a little girl. Kahrs correctly described her party as right-wing radical. Did she feel hit?
Weidel, who is now the AfD’s candidate for chancellor, has developed since she joined the party in 2013 on the short path from the DM nationalist opposition to the euro to collaborating with the Höcke wing and becoming an aggressive agitator against migrants.
From the lectern in the Bundestag, she stigmatized them in a cutting voice as “headscarf girls, fed knife men and other good-for-nothings”; She repeatedly reiterated the narrative of the Great Exchange represented by the European Identitarians, in her words: the “strategy of generation replacement through unregulated immigration”.
Changing contradiction
Not much is known about Weidel; she is sometimes described as a walking contradiction, because as chairwoman she stands for a lot (or almost everything) that East German AfD supporters in particular despise. A southwest German “lesbian” who lives in an open relationship with a woman; a neoliberal management consultant who previously worked at listed companies such as Goldman Sachs, the epitome of fatherless capital; a long-term tax evader residing in Switzerland; a woman who is emancipated in her own way and who, in an environment of toxic masculinity, is far superior to the men in the faction and party in terms of rhetoric and power tactics. And the AfD’s frequent attacks against foreigners, bigwigs, globalist elites and queer people are supported or ignored with a cold smile.
Many observers of these paradoxes have tried to understand who this woman is and what drives her: hunger for power? Fascist worldview? The above-mentioned appearance in the Bundestag reveals a high degree of hurt in her, which she compensates for with a defiant aggressiveness. The fact that she is ranked at the bottom of the popularity scale of German politicians is likely to encourage her, because her main concern is to have made it into the top ten in this popularity test.
Daughter of a refugee
Little-noticed cross-generational adoptions from their family of origin are likely to play a role. Alice Weidel, born in Gütersloh, Westphalia in 1969, was the best business student in her year with an excellent doctorate, the only Mandarin speaker in the Bundestag, is the daughter of a refugee from Upper Silesia, whose fate she feels committed to, and the granddaughter of a Nazi judge who joined the SS in 1933 she supposedly knew nothing. Both made their way to the post-war republic, but investigations into their grandfather had no consequences. They were defeated.
One can certainly not derive an ideological inheritance from this, but it can certainly be a victim story that runs over three generations. Weidel herself recently presented it to the right-wing US magazine “The American Conservative” when she rumored Germany to be a colony of the United States and gave the motto of the “Defeated of 1945”: “For we Germans are a defeated people.” She had There is even a quote from the national philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte: “Whatever has lost its independence has also lost the ability to intervene in the flow of time and freely determine its content.”
Such people “from now on no longer have a time of their own, but count their years according to the events and times of foreign nations and empires”. She illustrates that there are advantages to “being a slave” by pointing out that Germans were not forced to take part in the wars of the Western hegemonic power, which her party famously identified as the real trigger for the war in Ukraine.
Postcolonialism from the far right
The narrative voiced by Weidel goes back to the 1978 book by the right-wing political scientist Hans-Joachim Arndt “The Defeated of 1945. Attempt at a political science for Germans including an appreciation of political science in the Federal Republic of Germany”. It was directed against the re-establishment of the West German state Legal and constitutional state and the then highly controversial opinion that May 8, 1845 was a day of liberation.
For Arndt, Germany had simply fallen into the power of its occupiers, and this situation continued into Weidel’s lifetime: “’Germany’ – whatever that may be now – is still centrally determined today, in 1977, by May 8, 1945, from the day of unconditional surrender, of total defeat after a total war. This core event also determines the current situation, at least in Central Europe, and the other peoples and their statesmen obviously have a better sense of this than the Germans and some of their statesmen.”
This “situation analysis,” which goes back to the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, applies to Arndt’s followers, who gather in the “Institute for State Policy,” a New Right think tank in Schnellroda, and also to a united Germany.
Weidel’s neuralgic point
This postcolonialism from the far right defines the fundamental dissent from the established conservatism of the center right (aka “gardener conservatism,” as Armin Mohler, the doyen of the New Right, has described the CDU). And that is Weidel’s critical point: Above all, the “coming to terms with Nazi history” after 1945, in which the Christian Democrats hesitantly participated, was the fall from grace for the New Right. They fight it in order to get rid of the odium of fascism and to be able to pursue an unhindered reactionary policy that ignores the demands of the Basic Law (allegedly imposed by the Western Allies!).
The goal is to break down the “firewall” like in Italy, the Netherlands and Austria, where the tail has been wagging the dog since the right-wing radicals overtook the conservatives and reduced them to opportunistic junior partners. The levers, in keeping with the conspiracy theory of the Great Exchange, are the agitation against immigration and supranational ties to the West.
State-imposed warmongering
Alice Weidel is enough of a real politician to want to curry favor with Donald Trump and join forces with Elon Musk after the radical change in the USA. And here too she succeeds in distancing herself from the Union. “But now that we have reached the point of absolute nothingness, our political leaders have discovered the enthusiasm for war. Warmongering has become a state-mandated madness not seen since the end of the last world war. The CDU, which leads the opposition, is currently trumping the governing parties in who can issue the loudest and most vulgar war cries. And all this despite complete military incompetence.”
And the would-be chancellor cheerfully insults Friedrich Merz: “What we see here are really and truly the wild sexual fantasies of impotent people. We will put an end to this grotesque farce as quickly as possible.”
Germany is the country that can stop this woman.