Alice Weidel has a doctorate in economics, worked for Goldman Sachs and lived for six years in China. Openly gay, she lives with her partner, a Swiss film producer, with whom she has two sons. She describes herself as a “classic liberal”.
She is also the new face of the rightwing Alternative for Germany, whose rejection of open borders, Islam, the euro and political correctness has scandalised Germany’s establishment.
Doesn’t she ever get the feeling she’s in the wrong party? “Of course not,” she says in an interview. The AfD is, she says, a “liberal-conservative force that . . . tries to deal with the real problems I went into politics to solve”.
Liberal is not one of the words normally used to describe the AfD. But it hopes Ms Weidel will help soften voters’ perception of a party whose vociferously anti-immigration agenda helped establish it as the most successful rightwing movement in Germany’s postwar history.
When Germany threw open its borders to a million refugees, the party seemed unstoppable, feeding on rising disenchantment with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 12-year reign and the same frustration with politics-as-usual that fuelled the Brexit vote in the UK and Donald Trump’s rise to the US presidency.
The AfD is now represented in 12 of Germany’s 16 regional parliaments and is expected to enter the Bundestag for the first time in elections this September.
But the defeat of Marine Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands suggests rightwing populism in Europe may have peaked, for now anyway — and that goes for the AfD too.
The increasing dominance of its noisy, ultra-nationalist wing has scared off middle-of-the-road voters while an internal power struggle has exposed deep ideological divisions and raised doubts about its long-term future.
The internecine tensions burst into the open last month when party chief Frauke Petry, who had tried to move the party to the political centre, stunned supporters by announcing she would not lead the AfD’s campaign for September’s election.
At a party congress a few days later, delegates scrambled to fill the void by choosing Ms Weidel and Alexander Gauland, one of the leaders of the AfD’s national-conservative wing, as its two top election candidates.
It felt to some like a last throw of the dice by a party that is beginning to lose momentum. Its opinion poll ratings have slumped, from 16 per cent last September to 10 per cent now, in part reflecting the dramatic fall in the number of asylum-seekers entering Germany.
Voters who flirted with the AfD seem now to be returning to Ms Merkel’s CDU: the party scored a surprise victory in the northern region of Schleswig-Holstein on May 7 and is running neck-and-neck with the Social Democrats ahead of a critical election in North Rhine-Westphalia this Sunday.
The AfD’s new top team make an odd couple. The glamorous Ms Weidel, with her trademark black trouser suits and blond hair scraped back in a bun, is half the age of Mr Gauland, a gruff figure with a penchant for tweed jackets.
Some commentators were shocked that an out lesbian would agree to be the public face of a party whose manifesto enshrines the “traditional family” made up of “a father, mother and children” as the “guiding principle” for society.
She herself says there’s no contradiction. “To be in favour of the traditional family does not mean you reject other lifestyles,” she says. The AfD is not homophobic: “The fact that I was elected top candidate shows how tolerant it is.” It also has its own gay chapter with 150-200 members, she adds.
Jürgen Falter, politics professor at Mainz University, says Ms Weidel’s elevation makes sense. “The AfD wants to send out a signal that they’re not as bad as people think, and a lot more liberal,” he says. Whether the strategy will work is unclear. “It’s hard to see how her election is enough to compensate the AfD for the loss of their main campaign theme — the refugee crisis.”
Meanwhile, Ms Weidel may be not as liberal as she sometimes makes out. A year or so ago, a former investment banking colleague of hers received an email from a mutual friend with the question: “What happened to Alice?” It included a link to a speech by the young economist at an AfD event which was “pretty aggressive”, the ex-colleague says. “She was going against the press, and it had this undertone of: Let’s keep Germany for the Germans.”
“If she had such radical views while she was at the bank, she certainly kept them quiet,” he says.
Ms Weidel declined to comment on Thursday.
The strident tone can sometimes come through in her Facebook posts, where she lambasts the German army for rescuing refugees in the Mediterranean and rails against immigrant crime. In her acceptance speech at last month’s conference, Ms Weidel, who advises start-ups for a living, said she wanted, “as a woman, to be able to take the last train at night without fear”.
At the same time she has been forthright in her criticism of the AfD’s nationalist right, especially Björn Höcke, one of its most controversial local leaders. He caused outrage in January by arguing that Germany should stop atoning for its Nazi past. Ms Weidel demanded he be expelled from the party.
Mr Höcke’s intervention, she says, badly dented the AfD’s public image. In the aftermath, its potential electorate — people who could imagine voting AfD — slumped from 40 to 13 per cent. “That’s a dramatic change,” she says. “For me, [13 per cent] is absolutely unsatisfactory.”
Ms Weidel herself was initially attracted to the AfD not by its nationalist rhetoric but its staunch criticism of the euro. The former colleague recalls that while still working in banking she would express her “adamant opposition” to the common currency and put forward “very sophisticated arguments for why it wasn’t good for Germany”.
Upon joining the party, Ms Weidel, who did a masters in international economics and monetary policy, quickly joined its expert committee on the euro and in 2015 was elected to the AfD’s executive. But she insists she was always a reluctant activist. “I had a reputation as someone who said “actually I’d rather not”, she says. “I always felt I was being forced to do things for the good of the party.”
That ambivalence persisted into this year’s AfD conference. Ms Weidel says she stepped into the breach only after Ms Petry unexpectedly bowed out, and is so far not enjoying being in the political line of fire. She is, she says, “scared for myself, my family, my relatives …I’ve lost my freedom and my peace of mind.”
Meanwhile her every utterance is now picked over — and occasionally ridiculed — by the German media. In a speech last month she said that political correctness “belongs on the rubbish heap of history”. Speaking on the satirical TV show Extra 3, comic Christian Ehring agreed. “Yes, let’s all be incorrect, the Nazi bitch is right about that.”
Ms Weidel filed an official complaint over the comment. “I’ve got a pretty good sense of humour, but they crossed a line there,” she says.
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