Alice Weidel: The unlikely leader driving the far-right AfD to new heights

She is a woman in a party dominated by men. She lives with another woman from Sri Lanka, with whom she has two children, yet she is surrounded by leaders who champion the traditional family model of a man and a woman, while rejecting immigration. She is a politician from West Germany, yet leads a party that is most successful in the East, where its most vocal base resides. As a liberal economist with a cosmopolitan career, she heads a movement rooted in Germany’s old nationalism — an ideology that, due to the country’s history, unsettles many both within and outside its borders. On stage, she is a powerful speaker who calls for the “remigration” of foreigners, but in personal encounters, she comes across as almost timid, as if she did not quite believe the role she now plays on the national and international stage. She is an apparent moderate leading a party that, unlike its counterparts in France and Italy, has only become more radical over time, rather than softening its message.

Alice Weidel, 45, from Gütersloh, is an unconventional candidate for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), one of the most radical far-right parties in Europe, which continues to gain support with each election. When 600 delegates at the AfD party congress in Riesa, a small industrial town in the eastern state of Saxony, overwhelmingly approved her candidacy on Saturday: any lingering doubts about her leadership seemed to vanish.

It was as if the painstaking work of uniting the various factions, which have been at odds since the party’s founding in 2013, had been successfully completed. It seemed as though the mass demonstrations of a year ago, fueled by the uncomfortable revelation of a secret meeting where the mass deportation of immigrants was discussed — attended by party members and their associates — had been forgotten. In Germany, “remigration” carries particularly dark connotations due to the country’s Nazi past and the mass deportations of World War II.

For this politician, it hasn’t been a bad start to the year. She presents herself as competent and experienced in the private sector, offering an image that breaks with conventional stereotypes. On Thursday, there was a nearly hour-and-a-half-long talk with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and advisor to U.S. president-elect Donald Trump. Musk expressed enthusiastic support for the AfD, a party that, in Germany, is excluded from the democratic sphere by the rest of the political establishment and is under the watchful eye of the intelligence services.

Then on Saturday, came the cheers in the sports hall in Riesa, a city that was overrun by hundreds of riot police and thousands of anti-far-right protesters, who forced a two-hour delay to the start of the session. The culmination of the candidate’s stellar week came when polls confirmed that, if elections were held on Sunday, her party would secure more than 20% of the vote, making it the second-largest force in the Bundestag, just behind the Christian Democrats of Friedrich Merz, the frontrunner to succeed social democrat Olaf Scholz as chancellor.

“We live in times when people are drawn to unconventional politicians,” says Kay Gottschalk, an early AfD activist and member of parliament for North Rhine-Westphalia, in the corridors of the congress. “When you look at figures like Donald Trump or Javier Milei in Argentina, it’s clear that we’re no longer in an era of dull politicians, but of unique personalities.”

Gottschalk, hailing from the former West Germany, where the AfD presents itself as a traditional, free-market-oriented conservative party, finds common ground with Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, a regional parliamentarian from the former East Germany, where the AfD tends to win elections and its leaders often advocate more radical positions. “We respect people’s private lives,” Tillschneider says, addressing the apparent contradiction between the AfD’s promotion of the traditional family and the unconventional family structure of its candidate, Weidel. “Mrs. Weidel,” he adds, “has no problem with us presenting the family consisting of a man, a woman, and children as the model.”

Raised in prosperous West Germany during the 1980s and 1990s, Weidel studied economics and business before working for Goldman Sachs and Allianz. She lived in China and pursued an international career that could have led her to a global institution or multinational corporation. However, she returned to Europe and joined the AfD, where she rose to the top. While she has distanced herself from the more extreme factions of the party, she has also strategically courted and appeased them.

“A political chameleon,” describes Eva Kienholz, author of A Short History of the AfD, over the phone. In her speech in Riesa, Weidel waved the flag of “freedom of speech” in the face of alleged censorship by the dominant parties, while rousing the far-right with calls for “remigration.” “I don’t know how long this balance between absolute tolerance of the far right and the AfD’s image as a libertarian party will last within the party,” Kienholz adds.

Marcus Bensmann, a journalist for Correctiv — the publication that exposed the 2024 meeting in Potsdam where members of the German far right discussed mass expulsion plans for foreigners — highlights in his book, No One Can Say They Didn’t know. The AfD’s Outrageous Plans, that Weidel, despite her ability to unite the different factions, has not established herself as a leader. In fact, no one has succeeded in doing so in the AfD’s history, which is marked by a succession of leaders and internal conflicts.

“In Italy, there’s Giorgia Meloni; in France, Marine Le Pen; in Austria, Herbert Kickl; in Hungary, Viktor Orbán; and in the U.S., Donald Trump,” he notes. “But here, a dominant figure has not yet emerged.” It seems as though the historical aversion to a strong leader — a Führer in German — continues to affect the AfD, which some critics view as a direct heir to Nazism.

“Weidel is a visionary,” the party admits. Privately, several leaders confess to being taken aback when they heard her claim during Thursday’s conversation with Musk that Hitler “was a communist,” a historical falsehood she was attempting to use to rid the party of its Nazi label in front of an international audience. Musk’s endorsement could prove invaluable.

“That an entrepreneur like him, an admirable man who was laughed at by many when he started with SpaceX or electric cars, is now talking to Alice Weidel is an ennoblement for us,” says MP Gottschalk. “We are not Nazis!” he insists.

This is the party’s goal: to emerge from the corner of disgrace and erode the “cordon sanitaire” that, despite the far-right’s expected success in the February election, will continue to prevent it from governing. And all of this, while maintaining its principles. As if it were a question of normalizing its policies without deradicalizing — a matter of squaring the circle.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition