Alice Weidel: the ‘presentable’ leader of the AfD who does not shy

The lights are dimmed. Blue lasers shoot through the room, there is uplifting music from the speakers. It is at the beginning of January and the party day of the radical-right party Alternative Für Deutschland takes place in a sports hall in Riesa. People get up, claps and shouts, wave German flags. Alice Weidel, party leader of AfD, enters the stage. Alice für Deutschlandit sounds.

Everywhere where Alice Weidel comes to address her supporters, she is welcomed by an outrageous audience. Maligned by the sitting power, hailed by the dissatisfied citizen: who is the 46-year-old leader of the radical-right party on which one in five Germans voted?

Weidel grew up in a Catholic family in a town in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, as the daughter of a refugee: her father fled from Silesia in 1945 for the violence of the Red Army. Silesia was allocated to Poland after the victory of the Allies, Memanders never returned home. That event led to the fact that Weidel was raised with resentment against the Allies – after all, they had bombed Germany and took her father’s land.

The victory of the Allies over Nazi Germany does not celebrate Weidel, she told the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitungbecause she does not want to participate in the “debt cult” of Germany. That is in line with the prevailing view in her party: the AfD trivializes the Nazi past of Germany and rejects the German ‘feeling of guilt’ about the Second World War and the Holocaust.

‘Lille’ (her nickname) has a ‘dominant character’ that is full of ‘explosive paradoxes’, classmates wrote

The fact that her father fled for war is one of the many contradictions that apparently embodies Weidel. As a leader of an anti-migration party and in favor of closed borders, she turns unambiguously against refugees.

‘Lille’ (her nickname) has a ‘dominant character’ that is full of ‘explosive paradoxes’, classmates wrote According to a portrait of the German channel ZDF Already about her in the 1998 yearbook. Talented and persistent. But also someone who can pronounce lies with ‘sleeping unmercarability’, without leaving a muscle.

A walk with the truth

With the truth she still doesn’t take it closely. In Maagdenburg she called the attack on a Christmas market an “act of an Islamist,” while the suspect was just an Islam critic and AFD sympathizer. After the attack in Munich, she, in a debate that same evening, called the perpetrator a criminal asylum seeker who should have already left the country. The suspect was legal in Germany and not known to the police. In speeches she criticizes that professors at German universities only teach in ‘gender orientology’ – in reality only 0.6 percent of German professors are involved with gender studies. In a much -discussed interview with Elon Musk at the start of the election campaign, she called Adolf Hitler a communist, despite the persecution of communists by the Nazi regime.

Her relationship with that tech billionaire is striking because of the generally anti-American undertone in her party, and is also controversial: Musk recently intervened in the German elections (and also in European politics elsewhere) with a support to AfD, the interview with Weidel, a live stream of the AfD-Partijdag on X and a speech at a campaign meeting. After him, the American Vice President JD Vance, who, at the Security Conference in Munich, criticized, among other things, to excluding populist parties such as AfD, which led to much indignation in Germany. Where in recent television debates it became clear how isolated Weidel is in German politics, she is less and less alone internationally.

Under the leadership of Weidel, the AfD has almost become Salonfähig: for the first time the party was decisive in the Bundestag by voting for an anti-migration motion of CDU (previously support from AfD was not accepted by the other parties) and Weidel did in the campaign Participate in various television debates (previously her party was never invited). At the same time, other parties continue to exclude ADM for a possible government, including CDU, the party that became the largest.

Rainbow family

As leader of the nationalist and conservative party, Weidel can be called atypical: after her studies in Business Administration and Economy (she promoted Cum Laude on the Chinese pension system), she worked a lot abroad for financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs, the Bank of China, Allianz Global Investors and Credit Suisse. She speaks fluent mandarin. She lives in Switzerland with her wife and their two sons born in Sri Lanka.

Alice Weidel with her partner, the Swiss film producer Sarah Bossard, at the beginning of 2023 during a party meeting of the Swiss People’s Party (SVP). Weidel lives with her in Switzerland.

Her lesbian relationship and ‘rainbow family’ in particular are at odds with the views in her party about family values. For the party, a ‘family’ consists of a mother and father with children. Family is where children are, Weidel himself thinks. As a mysterious, she does not do it, including witness one movie On the Instagram profile of meadow girlfriend Sarah Bossard on which the two dance together in the car.

I am not queer, but only married to a woman

Meeidel also often receives questions about her homosexuality from outside the party. How does she deal with hostility against the queer community within her party, a viewer asked during an interview from channel Ard. I am not queer, Weidel replied, but only married to a woman.

A journalist at a AFD meeting received a similar answer to the question of how it can be explained that one of her election slogens is “time for Germany” while living in Switzerland. I don’t live there, said Weidel, I only have a home there. After the meeting she flew back to Switzerland.

Weidel went into politics at the age of 36, at the insistence of her partner. It was 2013, the AfD was just founded, as an entrepreneurial party that acted against the euro. She was mainly concerned with the economic condition of the country, only later she spoke about migration. In the meantime that is the hobby horse of AfD and Weidel has completely embraced it.

Ideology or opportunism

As a ‘presentable’ AfD’er, she was the chosen one: not a screaming man associated with Nazis, but an intelligent and eloquent woman with economic knowledge and international allure. But Viereidel also does not shy away from coarse language and sander: at the congress in Riesa she explicitly used the controversial term ‘remigration’ (which is used in right -wing circles as euphemism for mass expulsion of people with a migration background). In the interview with the Neue Zurcher Zeitung she called refugees a “looting, grabbing and blows with blades”.

The question is how much that is ideology, and how much opportunism. She would not initially want to use the term ‘remigration’ herself, but still did it with conviction when her party decided otherwise. She wanted to put Björn Höcke, leader of the AFD in Thuringia, out of the party in 2017 because of his neo -Nazi sympathies, now she calls him one Suitable minister in an AFD cabinet.

That adaptability suggests opportunism. But one in 2017 by the Welt Am Sonntag unveiled e-mail According to that newspaper, it mainly points to a ‘deep-rooted ideological position’: in the e-mail from 2013-even before the refugee crisis-Weidel already wrote that Germany was ‘flooded’ by ‘cultural peoples’, a concept from right-wing nationalist circles.

At least as extreme is the new slogan that was created especially for her: Alice für Deutschlanda variant of the Nazi battle cry Everything für Deutschland. The latter is forbidden in Germany, which first appears at AFD meetings on heart-shaped cardboard signs.

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