FROM ELLE Alice Weidel’s office, located on the sixth floor next to the Bundestag, looks west over an expanse of winter-brown treetops. This is the Tiergarten, Berlin’s most famous park. At its center rises a 67 meter (220 foot) column celebrating the defeat of Denmark by Prussia in 1864. Shining with golden glory at its highest, Victory, this particular version of the winged goddess, inspired by the Crown Princess of Prussia at the time, a daughter of Queen Victoria of England.
With her pulled-back blond hair, pointed nose, straight posture and simple, impeccable business attire, Ms. Weidel looks like a queen in waiting. As co-leader of Alternative for Germany (AFD), the most right-wing of the country’s seven main political parties, its influence has continued to grow. Certainly, the party, which was only launched in 2013 and presents itself under the color blue, only presents 78 of the 736 candidates in the Bundestag. Deputys. It does not control any of Germany’s 16 Länder, but only three small municipalities. A majority of Germans say they would never vote for it, and the other ruling parties have all vowed to avoid it. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, an agency responsible for internal security, has placed several local authorities AFD branches under surveillance for extremism.
Yet in the 19 months since Ms. Weidel ascended to the top, the AFD more than doubled its share of national “voting intentions”, going from 10% to well over 20%. This makes it the second most popular party in Germany, after the center-right opposition Christian Democrats (CDU) but ahead of the three parties in the government coalition. A recent poll suggests that Ms Weidel is more popular than Olaf Scholz, the social democratic chancellor.
During the elections to the European Parliament in June, the AFD is expected to far exceed its current nine seats, echoing a continent-wide trend that has boosted right-wing populists from Sweden to the Netherlands to Italy. In September, the states of Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia will go to the polls in September; THE AFD is the leading party in all three. By the next Bundestag elections, scheduled for 2025, Ms. Weidel and her co-leader, Tino Chrupalla, could indeed become a kind of Republican royalty, as kingmakers rather than monarchs.
Beyond her majesty, Ms. Weidel, 44, appears as a paradoxical figurehead of AFD. The party is dominated by men; women represent only one in nine deputies, compared to 35% for all parties combined. Mr. Chrupalla seems more typical: like many AFD voters, he is an East German and proudly working-class. He embodies the resentment against elites that has propelled the party through the turbulence of covid-19, high inflation and the war in Ukraine.
Ms. Weidel comes from a wealthy family in a small town in West Germany. She is armed with a P.hD in economics, and tends to prefer the controlled arena of the boardroom or studio rather than struggling in a crowd. His professional career before politics was dazzling. She worked for Goldman Sachs, a global investment bank, as well as Allianz, an insurance giant, before starting a private consulting practice. She spent several years in China, but heeded warnings that it could be a career mistake to be labeled a “Chinese hand”.
Openly gay, Ms. Weidel lives primarily in Switzerland. She and her partner, a Swiss filmmaker of Sri Lankan origin, are raising two sons aged seven and ten. Ms. Weidel says that although her partner had “very, very liberal” views – and despite German media intrusions into their private lives – she strongly supported his political career.
Sipping green tea in her office, the AFD The co-leader admits her decision to bring her political beliefs into public life was difficult. Impressed by its anti-euro stance, she worked part-time for the party for four years before being drawn into national elections and the spotlight in 2017. Representing a constituency in the state of Baden-Württemberg, in southern Germany, Ms. Weidel joined Mr. Chrupalla as CEO in 2022.
In addition to press attention, she and her party are now under official surveillance in three German states. “I find it really absurd that Stasi spies read my private correspondence and can listen to my telephone conversations when I am an elected opposition leader,” she said. Even more so, she adds, since her “capital sin” is simply to demand that Germany have secure borders. “Apparently, if you don’t say the borders are open for everyone, then you’re in this far-right corner! »
Ms. Weidel says most of Germany’s problems can be traced to what she describes as deeply irresponsible immigration policies, particularly the welcome given by Angela Merkel, chancellor from 2005 to 2021, to influx of refugees from the Syrian civil war and other migrants. . “I think politicians need to highlight the negative sides of certain Muslim population groups,” she says. “Crime rates have exploded and people from this background, particularly Afghans, followed by Iraqis and Syrians, are by far the most affected by crime. »
She also blames immigrants for Germany’s poor performance in a recent PISA study comparing education between countries. “The level is automatically reduced if they come from a non-[German]-linguistic, no-[German]— an uncultured cultural and educational context,” she says, citing a recent big fight at a Berlin school involving boys she describes as Middle Eastern.
More than a quarter of Germany’s 85 million inhabitants now have a migrant background. Yet police records show that instead of increasing after the influx of migrants, the country’s overall crime rate fell sharply between 2016 and 2021, before rising slightly last year. European rankings for public safety generally place Germany in the middle of the pack. Foreigners make up a growing proportion of schoolchildren and tend to score lower than ethnic Germans on tests. But PISA the results show narrower differences in neighboring countries with similar proportions of immigrants. Immigrants in the UNITED KINGDOM a higher score than native-born Britons, suggesting that Germany’s problem may lie in its school system rather than the ethnicity of students.
Yet Ms. Weidel’s mix of claims of persecution, alarmism, anti-immigration insinuations and nationalism plays well not only in favor of the AFD base, but to a growing number of Germans. A sign of this is the recent change on the part of CDU, Mrs Merkel’s party. A new CDU The manifesto published on December 10 pointedly replaced the phrase “Islam belongs to Germany” with wording that salutes Muslims “who share German values.”
This certainly pleased Ms. Weidel, although she also seemed to suggest that it might be too late. Germany has already lost its Cultural culture, or “leader culture,” she sighs. And after Ms. Merkel paved the way to ruin, the country’s current center-left coalition accelerated the decline. “We’ll have to see what’s left of the country when they’re done,” she said, delicately replacing her empty teacup in its saucer. ■