“It’s amazing to have a real conversation without being constantly contradicted or interrupted”she said, under the spell of her host, criticizing “lack of freedom of expression” in Germany. Solar and nuclear energy, immigration, Merkel, Hitler, trips to Mars and the extinction of the dinosaurs… no subject was omitted from this conversation in English, followed by some 200,000 people. A real electoral boost, free, for a party which, six weeks before the legislative elections, is credited with 21.5% of voting intentions, but which remains without coalition partners.
A profile that thwarts the codes of the extreme right
Dubbed by the richest man in the world, Alice Weidel is preparing to be confirmed as candidate for AfD chancellor for the legislative elections on February 23, by her party meeting in congress this weekend. It is therefore around this 46-year-old politician, with an atypical profile for a far-right party, that the AfD electoral campaign will revolve. In fact, Alice Weidel defies many of the codes of the political movement she has adopted. A woman in a party dominated by men, she is married to a Swiss woman of Sri Lankan origin with whom she is raising two boys. And this even though the AfD refuses marriage for all and adoption for same-sex couples.
For German justice, there is little doubt that the AfD is a far-right party, to be treated as such
To those who ask her if her cosmopolitanism – she lived for six years in China and her family lives in Switzerland – is in line with her party’s program, she replies that it “does not contradict wanting respect for state principles” notably “respect for national borders”. Another dissonance: this West German, finance expert, who worked for the investment bank Goldman Sachs and considers the former British Prime Minister Margareth Thatcher, champion of pure and hard liberalism, as a model, leads a party very established in the east of the country and which presents itself as the representative of “people from below” and criticizes the “globalized capitalism”.
A veneer of respectability, brutal language
These apparent contradictions, however, do not play a determining role within an AfD in full expansion and which sees in Alice Weidel a consensual personality, satisfying all currents. “She is a moderate who, like her party, has shifted to the right over time”comments Kai Arzheimer, from the University of Mainz. “She is a fairly weak co-president, and that is exactly what her base is asking for, which does not want an overly dominant personality at its head. Her strength is in not excluding anyone, unlike her predecessors”. With her navy blue blazer, her white blouse and her pearl necklace, Alice Weidel also contributes to a certain bourgeois respectability for a party considered too radical, even by Marine Le Pen, leading figure of the French far-right National Rally party .
Although she avoids extremist outings, Alice Weidel nevertheless embodies a new brutality in political debates, with her scathing tone and her sharp attacks in the Bundestag. Among his favorite targets, the social democrat Olaf Scholz, “the worst chancellor in the history of the country”the environmentalists who would lead the country to “deindustrialization”, “girls wearing headscarves”, “idle foreigners benefiting from social assistance”. Without forgetting the Christian Democratic right (CDU/CSU), accused of “copy the AfD” more than “betray the German vote” by refusing to work with her.
If no party currently wants to work with the AfD, Alice Weidel nevertheless says she is certain of being able to lead her party, sooner or later, to power. On the example of neighboring Austria, where the far right of the FPÖ could form a government with the conservatives.
The far right is at the gates of power in Austria for the first time since the end of the Second World War
