Alice
Weidel took the German far right to new heights. Here’s how she did it.
One in five
voters in the German election favored the far right. The AfD leader’s dramatic
rise terrifies many of the others.
February 23,
2025 10:16 pm CET
By Emily
Schultheis
https://www.politico.eu/article/german-election-2025-results-alice-weidel-afd-moment/
BERLIN —
Alice Weidel has never been more popular — nor more radical.
When the
chancellor candidate for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) took the
stage in Berlin Sunday night following her party’s best result yet in a
national election, supporters greeted her with chants of “Alice für
Deutschland! Alice für Deutschland!”
The chants
from the crowd weren’t just a jubilant display of enthusiasm for Weidel — they
were an undeniable sign of the increasingly open radicalism of the party and
its candidate.
Despite — or
because of — its extreme policies, the Afd won the support of one in five
German voters, doubling its vote share from 2021 and giving the far right its
highest-ever score in a national election since World War II. Given the sense
of crisis pervading the European continent since the election of U.S. President
Donald Trump, and given the surge in rightwing populism from Rome to Vienna and
Budapest, it could scarcely come at a more pivotal time.
It was an
“historic success,” Weidel said.
The “Alice
für Deutschland” mantra is a play on words evoking Alles für Deutschland, or
“Everything for Germany,” a phrase employed by Adolf Hitler’s SA stormtroopers.
It’s not the
first time party members have summoned the Nazi slogan. One of AfD’s most
extreme leaders, Björn Höcke, who heads the party in the eastern state of
Thuringia, was fined €13,000 last year for closing a campaign speech with the
phrase, which is banned in Germany. Since then the “Alice for Germany” chant
has allowed party members to needle and chip away at postwar norms, including
restrictions on speech that Germany put in place to prevent glorification of
its Nazi past.
In Weidel,
who has become a national figurehead for the AfD, the party has found a vessel
to do the same — to present a relatively palatable public face while remaining
at least partly extremist, in the view of domestic intelligence agencies.
Weidel
doesn’t obviously fit the bill of a right-wing radical. But her journey from
conservative economist to far-right leader resembles the path of the party
itself as it grew more extreme — and, as Sunday’s result showed, a large swath
of the German electorate has done the same.
From Goldman
Sachs to far right
Weidel’s
earlier career in international finance isn’t typically part of the resume of a
nationalist party leader.
Born in the
western German city of Gütersloh, she studied economics in the town of Bayreuth
and then worked as a financial analyst for Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt, and
later for Credit Suisse and insurer Allianz in Germany, China, Singapore and
Hong Kong. The man who advised her on her doctoral dissertation was the
economist Peter Oberender, who believes in strict free markets and helped found
a party that was a precursor to the AfD.
Weidel
joined the AfD in 2013 shortly after its inception and was a natural fit. At
the time it was a single-issue party founded by a group of economics professors
who, in the midst of Europe’s debt crisis, opposed the euro and financial help
for debt-ridden countries. In the 2013 federal election the AfD won 4.7 percent
of the vote, just under the 5-percent threshold for winning parliamentary
seats.
The AfD
began to shift to an anti-immigrant party during the unprecedented influx of
refugees from Syria and other parts of the Middle East in 2015. Radical-right
figures flocked to the party, seeing in it a vehicle to launch a far-right
movement, and pushing out many of the founders .
In early
2017, by which time Weidel was on the board of the AfD, the extreme-right Höcke
gave a speech urging Germans to forget the Nazi past or, as he put it, do a
“180-degree turnaround in policy of remembrance,” while also criticizing the
Holocaust memorial in Berlin. “We Germans, our people, are the only people in
the world who have planted a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,”
he said.
The speech
sparked a massive controversy in Germany, and the AfD’s board moved to expel
Höcke from the party. He survived the process, a moment that seemed to cement
the party’s radical course.
Later that
year, the party’s anti-immigration message helped it win its first seats in
parliament with 12.6 percent of the vote. As the party radicalized and became
more popular, Weidel adapted with it.
Asked in a
recent interview whether the attempt to expel Höcke had been a mistake, she
replied: “Of course.”
“I’ve gotten
to know him and the man is very down to earth,” she said, adding she could
imagine him as a minister in an AfD-led government.
Another sign
of Weidel’s radicalization came after a bombshell investigation last year
revealed that members of the party — including one of Weidel’s employees — had
attended a meeting of right-wing extremists at which a “master plan” to deport
migrants and “unassimilated citizens” was discussed. Those present
euphemistically described the policy as “remigration.”
News of the
meeting sparked a massive uproar in Germany, with sustained protests drawing
hundreds of thousands of Germans to the streets. Amid the tumult, AfD leaders
tried to distance themselves from the meeting and parted ways with Weidel’s
employee.
Months
later, however, Weidel and the rest of the party embraced “remigration.”
“I have to
be honest with you,” Weidel said at the party’s convention in Halle last month.
“If it’s to be called ‘remigration,’ then it’s called remigration!” The crowd
erupted in cheers.
‘Does that
sound like Hitler to you?’
Weidel is
now the face of the AfD and is adored by many of its supporters. At the party
convention last month, supporters raised heart-shaped signs that read:
“Chancellor of the Heart!” Making a heart shape back with her hands, she
declared: “I love you all!”
Weidel “is
really well-received by the people,” Leif-Erik Holm, an AfD parliamentarian and
leader in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, told
POLITICO before a campaign event in his hometown of Schwerin. “We’re noticing
her popularity.”
At the same
time, Weidel is not a charismatic figure around which the party revolves. Her
Jan. 9 X interview with tech billionaire Elon Musk turned into a rambling,
awkward dialogue about Hitler, God, and why “future Martians” will one day save
the Earth.
She’s also
an unlikely leader for an anti-immigration, male-dominated party that promotes
the traditional nuclear family. She identifies as a lesbian and, although she
represents a district in southern Germany, lives in Switzerland with a woman
from Sri Lanka. Together they are raising two boys.
Weidel has
dismissed interest in her sexual orientation, saying she doesn’t consider
herself “queer” and that the topic hasn’t been an issue within the AfD. One AfD
parliamentarian from eastern Germany told POLITICO her presence at the top of
the ticket is allowing the party to make inroads with young people.
“Someone
like Alice is a much better person than a lawyer from the West in his sixties,
like the other parties have,” the parliamentarian said. “She is really a
sympathetic figure.”
Her
unconventional profile allows her to deny accusations that the party is
intolerant or far-right. “Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!” Musk
wrote of Weidel’s background in an opinion piece for German newspaper Welt am
Sonntag, in which he endorsed the AfD. (Welt, like POLITICO, is owned by the
Axel Springer Group.)
The support
of people like Musk and of right-wing populists in both the U.S. and Europe has
also provided an unexpected lift for Weidel and her party, lending them the
legitimacy they’ve long lacked at home.
During the
election campaign, Weidel traveled to Budapest to meet with Hungarian Prime
Minister Viktor Orbán. She also spoke with U.S. Vice President JD Vance Feb. 14
on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, where Vance railed against
Europe’s centrist parties and advised German leaders to work with the AfD
instead of maintaining a “firewall” around the party.
Both Musk
and Austrian far-right leader Herbert Kickl joined the AfD’s kickoff campaign
rally in January, touting the party as Germany’s best hope.
This
newfound support from abroad comes at a time when right-wing populism is
flourishing on both sides of the Atlantic. It was a reflection of the
remarkable position Weidel now finds herself in: accepted in places where she
and the AfD have long been shunned.
“The AfD is
not a party that is welcomed by prime ministers in all European countries,”
Orbán said during Weidel’s visit in Budapest. “But it is high time we change
that.”
Weidel hopes
that international legitimacy will give her party the acceptance it craves at
home.
As results
came in on Sunday night, Weidel said the Afd stood ready to “implement the will
of the people.”
“We have
never been stronger,” she said.
Nette
Nöstlinger contributed to this report.
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