Who is Germany’s far-right AfD leader Alice Weidel?

Alice Weidel belongs to a very small minority. She is one of nine women in the parliamentary party of the far-right Alternative for Germany. Sixty-nine men make up the rest. 
Politically, Weidel is a heavyweight in the male-dominated AfD. She co-chairs both the party and the parliamentary party together with Tino Chrupalla. Weidel also ran on a joint ticket with Chrupalla in the last federal elections in 2021. The result back then was disappointing for the AfD: They won 10.3%, down from 12.6% in 2017.
Since then, however, the party has gone from strength to strength. In recent state elections, the AfD recorded results between 18.4% in the central German state of Hesse and 32.8% in Thuringia in eastern Germany. The party, which has been classified as a suspected right-wing extremist group by the country‘s domestic intelligence service (BfV), is currently getting national poll ratings of up to 20%.
Boosted by this success, the AfD’s leadership has now decided to put forward its own candidate for chancellor in the federal elections even though they are not expected to have a real chance to head the government. Even if the AfD were to become the party with the most votes, all other parties have rejected the idea of becoming its coalition partners.
The 45-year-old Weidel has a doctorate in economics. In the late 2000s, she worked at the Bank of China and lived in China for six years where she learned to speak Mandarin. Subsequently, she wrote her doctoral thesis on the future of the Chinese pension system. 
Weidel is an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s prime minister from 1979 to 1990. Speaking of Thatcher in an interview with the tabloid Bild newspaper, she said: “I’m impressed by her biography, her swimming against the tide even when things get unpleasant.”
Thatcher was known as the “Iron Lady” because she stuck to her neoliberal economic line in the face of considerable resistance. She stood for low taxes, welfare cuts and privatization. It is a program that appeals to Weidel, a former management consultant. “Thatcher took over Britain when the country was economically down and got it back on track,” she said in the same interview.
When Weidel joined the AfD in 2013, not long after it had been founded, the party was a euroskeptic and national liberalist party. In her opinion, that has not changed. “We are trying to reform the EU,” she told the newspaper Welt am Sonntag in August.
Weidel said that if reforms failed, then every country had to be given the opportunity to hold a referendum on their membership of the European Union.
In the same interview, Weidel refused to accept that there had been a shift to the right within her party. She even defended Björn Höcke, the leader of the extremist branch of the AfD in the eastern state of Thuringia. Höcke has been convicted several times for repeatedly using Nazi slogans in public. Yet, Weidel claimed: “He has toned down the very provocative element. He is doing an excellent job in Thuringia. I find the criminal trials ridiculous and dubious.”
This is how the AfD top politician talks about a man who, according to a court ruling, can be called a “fascist”. What’s more, his own party accused him of having “affinities with National Socialism” back in 2017 and Weidel backed moves to expel him. However, the national leadership’s application was rejected by a tribunal.
Weidel openly admits that she likes to provoke. In 2018, she referred to refugees and asylum seekers in the Bundestag as “knife-wielding men on welfare” and “headscarf girls.” The AfD parliamentary party leader was publicly reprimanded for this by the then parliamentary president Wolfgang Schäuble.
A few days later, she justified her choice of words in an interview with Switzerland’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung. “Polarization is a stylistic device to spark debates,” she told the newspaper. By using the term “headscarf girl,” she said that she wanted to draw attention to the fact that Germany had a problem with conservative Islam. In her opinion, it is incompatible with the country’s Basic Law.
Alice Weidel, the provocateur? Someone who may face prejudice in her own ranks because of her private life? She is in a civil partnership with a woman who comes from Sri Lanka. Together, they have two adopted children. That is a far cry from the AfD’s ideals. In the party’s manifesto, the party is committed to the model of the traditional family. It states: “In the family, mother and father take permanent joint responsibility for their children.”
The AfD’s future candidate for chancellor, who lives in Germany and Switzerland, in no way embodies her party’s world view. That’s not a problem for Alice Weidel. As she said back in 2017, “One or two people may feel aggrieved, but that also exists in other parties.”
This article was originally written in German.
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