She is a woman in a very masculine party. She lives as a couple with another woman originally from Sri Lanka and with two children in common, but surrounded by leaders who promote the family made up of a man and a woman and reject immigration. It is a West German policy in a formation that obtains the best results in the East, and has its most combative base there. A liberal economist with a cosmopolitan professional career at the head of a militancy in which old German nationalism is rooted, a nationalism that, due to the history of this country, scares many inside and outside its borders. A speaker who raises her voice on the podium when she calls for the “remigration” of foreigners, but who in close contact appears almost shy, as if she can’t quite believe the place she occupies today on the national and international scene. An apparent moderate leading a party that, unlike others in the same sphere in France or Italy that aspire to normalize, instead of softening the message, has become radicalized over the years.
Alice Weidel (Gütersloh, 45 years old) is an atypical candidate for Alternative for Germany (AfD), one of the most radical parties among the European extreme right that continues to gain positions, election after election. When the AfD congress this Saturday in Riesa, a small industrial town in the eastern state of Saxony, the 600 delegates approved his candidacy by acclamation, doubts about his leadership seemed to be suddenly erased.
As if their laborious work to unite the multiple wings, always at odds since the foundation in 2013, had culminated successfully. As if the massive demonstrations of a year ago had been forgotten, after the uncomfortable revelation about a meeting in which mass deportation of immigrants was discussed, and in which members of the party and people close to it participated. In Germany, “remigration” is a word that, due to the history of Nazism and the deportations of World War II, has especially ominous resonances.
It has not been a bad start to the year for this policy that sells competence and experience in the private sector, and an image that breaks stereotypes. First was the dialogue of almost an hour and a half, on Thursday, with Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and advisor to the president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, and the magnate’s enthusiastic support for the AfD, a party to which, In Germany, the rest are excluded from the democratic field and are subject to surveillance by the intelligence services.
Afterwards, the acclamation at the Riesa sports palace, a city taken over by hundreds of riot police and thousands of protesters against the extreme right who forced the start of the sessions to be delayed for two hours. The culmination of the candidate’s stellar week are the polls that confirm that, if the elections were held this Sunday, her party would obtain more than 20% of the votes and would be the second force in the Bundestag only behind Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats. , favorite to succeed the social democrat Olaf Scholz in the chancellery.
“We live in times when people like atypical politicians,” says Kay Gottschalk, a senior member of the AfD and deputy for North Rhine Westphalia, in the halls of the congress. “When you see Donald Trump, or Javier Milei in Argentina, it is clear that we are no longer in the time of boring people, but of unique figures.” Gottschalk comes from the former West Germany, where the AfD presents itself as a traditional, free-market-oriented conservative party. But in Riesa, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, a regional parliamentarian in the former East Germany, agrees with him on this point, where, unlike in the West, the AfD wins elections, and its leaders usually defend more radical positions. “We respect people’s private lives,” he says, alluding to the contradiction, on the part of the AfD, between the promotion of the traditional family and the family of its candidate, Weidel. “Mrs. Weidel,” he adds, “has no problem with us, here, presenting as a model the family composed of a man, a woman and children.”
Raised in prosperous West Germany in the 1980s and 1990s, after studying Economics and Commerce, Weidel worked at Goldman Sachs and Allianz, lived in China and began an international career that could have taken her to an international institution or a multinational. But he returned to Europe and joined the AfD, and it was there that he rose to assume leadership. He has managed to keep his distance from the most ultra wing, but, at the same time, he has courted and appeased them.
“A political chameleon,” Eva Kienholz, author of Eine kurze Geschichte der AfD (A brief history of the AfD). In his speech in Riesa, Wiedel waved the flag of “freedom of expression” in the face of alleged censorship by the dominant parties, and excited the extreme right with calls for “remigration.” “I don’t know how long this balance between absolute tolerance when it comes to the far right, and the idea of the AfD as a party that is supposed to be libertarian, will last within the party,” says Kienholz.
Marcus Bensmann is a journalist for Correctivthe publication that a year ago revealed the meeting in Potsdam in which members of the German extreme right discussed plans for the mass expulsion of foreigners, and has published the book Niemand kann sagen, er hätte es nicht gewusst. Die ungeheuerlichen Pläne der AfD(No one can say they didn’t know. AfD’s scandalous plans.) Bensmann emphasizes that Weidel, despite his ability to unite the different currents, has not established himself as a leader. In reality, no one has achieved it in the history of the AfD, a succession of leaders and fights between currents. “In Italy there is Giorgia Meloni; in France, Marine Le Pen; in Austria, Herbert Kickl; in Hungary, Viktor Orbán and in the US, Donald Trump,” he says. “But a figure has not crystallized here.” It is as if the allergy, for historical reasons, to the strong leader—a Fuehrerin German—reached the party that some rivals point out as a more or less direct heir to Nazism.
“Weidel is a visionary,” they admit in the party. Privately, several leaders acknowledge their confusion when they heard his statement on Thursday, during the conversation with Musk, that Hitler “was a communist,” a historical falsehood with which he sought to remove the party’s Nazi label before an international audience. Musk’s help could be invaluable. “That a businessman like him, an admirable man who many laughed at when he started with SpaceX or electric cars, now speaks with Alice Weidel, represents an ennoblement for us,” says Deputy Gottschalk. “We are not Nazis!” he proclaims.
This is the objective: to get out of the corner of the plague and erode the cordon sanitaire that, despite the fact that in February the extreme right obtains the greatest success in the history of contemporary Germany, will prevent it from governing. And all this, maintaining the principles. As if it were about normalizing without deradicalizing. Squaring the circle.
