Seven minutes into Alice Weidel’s first big election interview, the 46-year-old delivered the meme of the campaign: rolling her eyes on live television.
The lead candidate for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) was explaining why only her party can fix Germany’s broken politics, economics, and fiscal and migration policies.
“AfD votes are already shaping the country,” she declared with satisfaction. It was a nod to how her party backed – and helped pass – a hardline, non-binding migration motion tabled last month by the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
That vote ended a historic day in parliament that began, Weidel’s interviewer noted, with a speech to mark Holocaust memorial day from survivor Roman Schwarzman. He told listening MPs that “we must, once again, do everything to put barbarism in its place”.
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The mention of the Holocaust is when Weidel rolled her eyes.
“Why did you roll your eyes?” asked the host.
“I didn’t,” replied Weidel.
“Oh okay,” the host added lightly, “maybe just I saw it.”
The whole country saw it and heard Weidel insist, between sips of water, that “German politics should not be driven by guilt, but come from a position of confidence.”
“I don’t think we should keep looking to the past,” she said, “to a guilt cult.”
It was another step in the remarkable political transformation of Weidel, the fresh face of Germany’s rightward political shift. In Budapest this week, Viktor Orban, Hungary’s populist prime minister, hailed her as “the future of Germany”.
One in five German voters agree with him, according to polls, with the AfD now the country’s second-largest political party, ahead of next Sunday’s federal election.
Though no other party will co-operate with it, AfD officials are quietly confident they can secure a 25 per cent blocking minority in the next Bundestag. That is the point when Weidel will have arrived as Germany’s most uncomfortable and unavoidable politician.
She was born in 1979 into a middle-class family in the Westphalian town of Gütersloh. Like many other leading AfD figures, Weidel’s grandparents were among the estimated 12-14 million ethnic Germans expelled from eastern territories after 1945. The old Weidel family homeplace was in Silesia, now Poland, where Weidel’s grandfather worked during the Nazi occupation as a military judge.
Her furniture-dealer father talked Weidel out of studying medicine, and she opted for economics instead. After working for Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs in Japan, China and Singapore, Weidel returned to Germany and founded her own consulting company aged 36.
As an early AfD member, she made herself useful to leaders by delivering numbers to underpin their anti-bailout policies.
Throughout the AfD’s turbulent first decade of infighting and leadership heaves, Weidel remained a low-key constant in her work uniform of navy trouser suit, white open-necked blouse and pearls. A more recent addition are cream woollen turtlenecks.
Before and after she became party co-leader in 2022, Weidel presented herself as the party’s moderate, liberal face, more comfortable with an audience of bankers than beer-drinkers.
With her corporate look and doctor title, she seemed an odd fit in a party where fellow MPs and a former press spokesman backed ideas to shoot migrants at the border – or gather them up and gas them.
In private, though, Weidel has never been shy of bawdy rhetoric, raging in an email to friends in 2013 how Germany was being “flooded with culturally foreign civilisations such as Arabs, Sinti and Roma, etc”.
In 2016, when Germany saw a series of violent attacks involving asylum seeker perpetrators, Weidel attracted headlines for arguing that Angela Merkel – who kept Germany’s borders open throughout the migration crisis – “naturally shares responsibility” for the crimes.
Ramping up the rhetoric of late on social media – condemning migrants as a “grasping, marauding, knife-stabbing mob” – gained her 982,000 follower-fans on X, including its owner, Elon Musk.
After a series of posts endorsing the AfD, he joined a giggling Weidel for an hour-long livestream on his platform last month.
“Nothing outrageous is being proposed, just common sense,” said Musk to listeners. “Alice Weidel is very reasonable, and hopefully people can hear that from this conversation.”
With more than 200,000 people tuned it at times, Weidel insisted Adolf Hitler was a communist and her party was a conservative-libertarian movement that now occupied the right wing of German politics abandoned by Merkel.
Throughout her rise, Weidel has closely guarded her home life. She lives in Switzerland and is married to a woman of Sri Lankan descent. They have two sons – a family model at odds with AfD’s more traditional ideals.
Weidel shrugs off the contradictions. In rare comments on her personal life, she told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung last month how her Swiss home has become a refuge from attack and stalkers, where she takes cold showers and long weekend walks – and even hugs trees to calm her nerves.
The last year in particular has been a rollercoaster for Weidel, as she aligned herself – politically and rhetorically – with the party’s more radical eastern wing, viewed as “confirmed extreme right” by German domestic intelligence.
A year ago Weidel fired her chief adviser for attending a meeting with far-right activists – exposed by investigative journalists – that discussed so-called “remigration”, or expulsion of non-ethnic German citizens.
Exactly a year after heated AfD denials that “remigration” was, or would ever be, party policy, AfD delegates backed a new programme last month supporting “remigration” to deport criminal foreign nationals and revoke the German passports of dual nationals who commit crimes.
“If that’s what remigration means,” a fiery Weidel told party delegates from the conference stage, “then remigration it is”.
[ Elon Musk pens German newspaper opinion piece supporting far-right AfD partyOpens in new window ]
Weidel insists her positions have not changed radically since those laid out in her 2019 book Widerworte (Backchat): smaller state, lower taxes, more direct democracy, restrictive asylum. But she has become more radical on migration and the EU. Instead of backing a reformed EU as a trading bloc, for instance, she now wants Germany to leave the union entirely.
Weidel’s arrival as leader has benefited hugely from public frustration at Berlin’s unpopular, dysfunctional three-way coalition. Recent sociological studies indicate that AfD voters are often more alarmed and triggered by recent crises, from migration to the pandemic.
Educated men aged 35-44 are their largest voter bloc. Many are middle class, fearful of losing prosperity and social status, who are increasingly wary of mainstream narratives and favour authoritarian answers to social problems.
By pushing an emotionalised, attack style in the Bundestag, in interviews and on social media, Weidel’s AfD has simultaneously engineered – and been the main beneficiary of – a shift in Germany’s political culture and discourse.
The calm, centrist Merkel years have yielded to tough-talking, thin-skinned political rhetoric, mirroring Europe’s wider, agitated centre-right political reality. The AfD’s secret weapon here is how it has mastered TikTok like no other party. Its clips can clock up 500,000 views – 10 times the average of other parties’ content.
Bypassing mainstream media, this is where the party reaches its voters, and channels outrage over a series of knife and car attacks in Germany.
The latest took place on Thursday in Munich, with a 24-year-old Afghan national detained on suspicion of driving a car into a march, injuring 30 people.
After a series of social media posts, Weidel went on live television on Thursday evening to argue that “under the AfD, he wouldn’t have been here in the first place”.
Regardless of how the latest attack influences the February 23rd election result, Weidel is playing the long game.
“We won’t manage to overtake the CDU this time around,” she said in a recent interview. “But we will by the next federal election” in 2029.
