How AfD's Alice Weidel went from German pariah to top opposition figure
Alles für Deutschland, ('everything for Germany') was once a Hitler-era rallying cry. It was more recently adopted by Björn Höcke, a high-ranking member of Germany's far-right Alternative für Deutschland at party rallies, for which he was prosecuted.
Then in August last year the slogan popped up at events attended by Alice Weidel, the party's co-leader, but in a subtly modified form – Alice für Deutschland. The party printed blue cardboard hearts bearing the slogan and distributed them to members, who held them up at rallies to show their approval.
The 46-year-old has been credited with being the driving force behind the AfD's success in last month's election. In a seismic result, the party doubled its vote share to 20.8% . For the first time since the second world war a far-right party is now the second largest force in parliament. When the newly elected Bundestag convenes for the first time on Tuesday, it will take up no fewer than 152 out of 630 seats as the main opposition force in the new parliament, where Weidel has vowed to do battle with her opponents at the dispatch box.
'The AfD is now firmly anchored as a people's party,' Weidel declared on election night, pledging to 'hunt' the other parties in government and promising to 'shift up two gears'.
Under her watch the AfD has attracted donations from German millionaires, and in the run-up to the vote she was praised by Elon Musk, who repeatedly hailed the AfD on his X platform as the only party capable of saving Germany, where he hosted her for a tête-à-tête in which they appeared to downplay the Nazi era, even appearing on screen at the AfD's final pre-election rally.
In many respects her backstory and home life make her an improbable figurehead for a radical anti-immigration party that is under surveillance by security authorities for suspected extremism.
A Mandarin speaker who has previously lived in Singapore and Hong Kong, she lives in Switzerland with her Sri Lanka-born wife and their children. On the campaign trail she was unable to answer a question about how many people live in the constituency she represents.
Her relationship puts her at odds with the AfD's own policies on the family unit, which it defines in strictly heterosexual terms. The party explicitly rejects other definitions and has campaigned for the abolition of same-sex marriage.
'She does not exactly have the sociodemographic characteristics you'd expect from an AfD voter,' said Andreas Busch, a political scientist at Göttingen University, who contrasted her with the party's other co-leader, Tino Chrupalla, a painter-decorator by trade. Chrupalla, Busch said, was 'rather more pedestrian, down-to-earth and has no intellectual pretensions'.
One AfD supporter told the Guardian they weren't interested in Weidel's lifestyle but instead judged her on her messaging and 'her ability to address our concerns, and makes us feel counted'.
Asked for her own view, Weidel has previously said she did not 'see skin colour' and that 'I'm not queer, I'm just married to a woman who I've known for 20 years.'
With her trademark cream polo necks and pearl necklaces, Weidel has undoubtedly lent a different air to a party led by ageing male professors and economists when it was founded in 2013 as a Eurosceptic alternative to the conservative CDU. Image, say analysts, counts for a lot: even as the party has moved ever further to the right on immigration and Islam, Weidel has helped somehow to detoxify it in the eyes of some voters.
'She is often smiling at the same time as having very aggressive rhetoric,' said Busch, who added that she had at times maintained a 'dangerous' ambiguity in order to expand the AfD's electoral appeal.
On the one hand, she has enthusiastically adopted the use of the term 'remigration', a highly controversial but nebulous far-right concept that is usually understood to mean the mass deportation of foreign-born people – even if they are naturalised citizens.
'But at the same time as using this term, she says 'of course we need migration',' Busch said. 'It's that creative ambiguity which allows her to appeal to different parts of the electorate. 'It's … dangerous but also electorally attractive.'
Less ambiguous has been her embrace of AfD figures who were once shunned for their extremism. She has said she wants to make Höcke – who has two convictions for knowingly using Nazi language at a political event – one of her ministers. And last month she welcomed Maximilian Krah and Matthias Helferich – who were sidelined over remarks they made relating to the Nazis – into the AfD's parliamentary group.
Deike Diening, a Spiegel journalist who spent months shadowing Weidel in the run-up to the election, said she had worn two hats simultaneously, staying in the party's top ranks by tolerating and even courting the party's most radical right wing while also remaining 'the comparatively friendly face of the party for the broad public'.
Having emulated the electoral gains of other women on the far right in Europe, most notably Marine Le Pen in France and Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Weidel now faces the challenge of piloting the party in opposition towards its ultimate goal of victory in the next election in 2029.
Busch said: 'She's mainly interested in gaining power and that is where her main challenge now lies. The question is will she keep the AfD focused on resentment, continuing its fundamental opposition role, or is she ultimately interested in some sort of power perspective, which would require her to tone down the rhetoric?'
In the short term, Weidel has little hope of breaking through the 'firewall' erected by the other mainstream parties to block the AfD's entry into government. But if another unwieldy, quarrelsome coalition fails to get Germany back on track, her party will be waiting in the wings next time round.
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