Alice Weidel took the German far right to new heights. Here’s how she did it. – POLITICO Europe

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. 

^{Source: ARD}

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.