Alice Weidel may not be the person you would imagine at the top of Germany’s far-right political movement.
She’s gay with a Sri Lankan partner, the film-maker Sarah Bossard. And Ms Weidel, the leader of a party that obsesses about its love for Germany, is not even a full-time resident of the country.
Instead, she splits her time between Berlin and Switzerland, along with her partner and their two sons.
What’s more, she’s a West German at the top of the AfD, which is, and has always been, far stronger in East Germany.
In a party that is often accused of harbouring extremists, she comes across as more reasoned and less obsessive. Ms Weidel, it is said, is the AfD’s key to reaching Germans from three crucial areas – the middle classes, the politically unsure, and the country’s West.
But it would be wrong to consider her a moderate. She may have joined the AfD because of its economic policies, but she has enthusiastically endorsed the party’s move to focus more on migration and German nationalism.
Immigrants, she once said, were made up of “burqas, girls in headscarves, knife-wielding men on government benefits and other good-for-nothing people”. It was a phrase that earned her censure from rivals in the centre, and respect from those on the right who see migration as a national threat.
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As a speaker, she is strident, radical and unapologetic. She describes herself as a “liberal conservative” but, when I saw her speak at her party conference earlier this year, she demanded the “large scale repatriation of foreigners” – a policy once seen as toxic, but now spelt out by her in syllables – “re-mi-gra-tion”, Ms Weidel said, emphatically, to the sound of cheers.
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Ms Weidel, a gay parent, has endorsed the definition of a family as being specifically mother, father and children. She says legalising gay marriage is unimportant.
She has claimed that Germany is the real victim of the war in Ukraine, due to the economic damage it has, and will, suffer. The war, she said, “is not our issue at all” and claims that, when it ends, Ukraine should be held to account.
Ms Weidel was born in Gutersloh, a town of around 100,000 people roughly halfway between Dortmund and Hanover, where she said she was repeatedly insulted and abused by immigrants from the Middle East.
She studied in Germany’s east, in Bayreuth, then worked for Goldman Sachs and the Bank of China, spending six years living in China.
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She is a fan of economic liberalism – declaring Margaret Thatcher to be her role model, and championing, for example, low taxes and the abolition of inheritance tax. Only recently, grudgingly, has she accepted it is no longer practical for Germany to stop using the Euro as its currency, but her Euroscepticism remains.
The past of her country and her own family sit over her role as the AfD’s leader. Ms Weidel’s grandfather, Hans Weidel, was a Nazi judge, appointed by Adolf Hitler, a fact of which she claims to have been oblivious until researchers revealed it to her.
During a live chat with Elon Musk, since viewed millions of times online, she claimed the Nazis were “not right-wing” and said Hitler was “a communist, socialist guy”. In fact, Hitler loathed communists and socialists; they were some of the first people sent to concentration camps.
She has questioned the point of Covid vaccines, doubted the evidence of global warming and echoed the “great replacement” theory of so many conspiracy theorists. For some, she is a dangerous, even ominous presence. For others, she is a refreshing and radical change.
