“Alice? Who the fuck is Alice?” wondered European audiences in 1995 when the Dutch band Gompie landed an unlikely success by adding this risque line to Smokie’s 1970s hit Living Next Door to Alice. Thirty years on, the question is on many minds again, this time regarding the mercurial co-leader of Germany’s buoyant anti-immigration party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Ahead of the German elections on 23 February, many want to know: who exactly is Alice Weidel?
It’s a pertinent question. For the first time since the Nazi era, a far-right party has ambitions to head a German government. The AfD is fielding the 45-year-old Weidel as its first-ever chancellor candidate. She is unlikely to win office this time, but her party is polling in second place and set to double its vote share to over 20%.
Now indisputably a major player in German politics, Weidel receives more media attention than ever. But this has not made it easier to pin down what she would actually do if she were chancellor. She describes herself as “liberal-conservative” rather than far-right, but there is a darker side to her rhetoric that blurs the lines between conviction and opportunism.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk recently endorsed the AfD as “the last spark of hope” for Germany in a controversial op-ed for the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag. Referring to the fact that Weidel is in a same-sex relationship with a woman from Sri Lanka, Musk asked: “Does that sound like Hitler to you?”
Weidel’s profile indeed does not lend itself to Hitler comparisons. An economist by trade, she has lived and worked all over the world, from Canada and Japan to Singapore and China. She spent five years in Beijing, where she perfected her Mandarin, which she began teaching herself from cassettes at the age of 14. Weidel has worked for Goldman Sachs and advised the Bank of China. Now, she is in a civil partnership with film-maker Sarah Bossard with whom she raises their two sons in a picturesque town in Switzerland.
No, that doesn’t sound particularly radical. But at the AfD’s latest party conference, the same Alice Weidel did sound radical when she demanded “large-scale repatriations” of foreigners, the demolition of Germany’s “windmills of shame”, and an end to “queer-woke insanity”. Despite her own situation, she was happy for the AfD to limit its definition of family to “father, mother and children”. With Weidel at the helm, the party has reached its most hardline stance to date.
Yet her team had earlier pushed for moderation, notably by removing the far-right term “remigration” from the AfD’s election manifesto. This term refers to the mass deportations of immigrants regardless of their settlement status. But when Weidel realised her party wouldn’t budge, she U-turned with remarkable speed and ease. She reassured the conference that mass deportations were on the cards, and “if that’s going to be called remigration, then that’s what it’s going to be: re-mi-gra-tion”. She emphasised every syllable to frenetic applause.
Ideological flexibility is Weidel’s trademark. Most recently, she was happy to “warmly congratulate President Donald Trump on his successful inauguration” on social media despite the distinctly anti-American tone of the AfD manifesto that sees the “interests of the USA diverge increasingly from those of Germany” and prefers closer ties to Russia. It is no coincidence that she made it known that she had been invited to Trump’s inauguration but chose not to go. The message is clear: she has powerful American backers but is not an Atlanticist.
Unlike others in her party, Weidel has always shown the political acumen to balance power politics and ideological purity. She joined the AfD in 2013, when it was founded as a Eurosceptic party and long before it shifted much further to the right. Over the years, she has been involved in efforts to expel radicals such as Björn Höcke, the leader of the AfD in the state of Thuringia, whom she saw as a liability. But he proved too powerful to eliminate, and so Weidel made her peace with him.
Embracing Höcke’s extremism is the price Weidel pays to stay atop the AfD and hold the notoriously fractured party together. In exchange, his faction supports her leadership. Höcke has been fined twice for using the Nazi slogan “Everything for Germany” or “Alles für Deutschland”. In allusion to this, the conference chanted “Alice für Deutschland” and the “liberal-conservative” Weidel seemed OK with that.
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Her tolerance for such radical politics and rhetoric has tempted some observers to underestimate Weidel’s appeal. Following the recent public conversation between her and Musk on the latter’s social media platform X, the verdict of the German media was damning. “On content, it was very, very weak,” mused a factchecker employed by Germany’s public broadcaster ARD. Others ridiculed Weidel’s English, the way she giggled at Musk’s jokes or the platitudes and falsehoods that laced the discussion, like Weidel’s claim that “Hitler was a communist”.
It would be a mistake to assume that public appearances that appear radical or ridiculous to liberal commentators will harm Weidel. These people are not the target audience. Take the live chat with Musk, which was attended by more than 200,000 people. Many of the comments from listeners praised the podcast-like style of the conversation as free from restrictions rather than rambly or weak. Weidel’s appeal should certainly not be underestimated. One recent survey even had her as the most popular candidate if Germans could vote for their chancellor directly.
Weidel may well represent the more moderate end of the AfD. But as she has proved in recent weeks, she also possesses a steely determination to do and say whatever it takes to get to the top. It is this most presentable face of the AfD that its opponents should be most concerned about. Whoever the real Alice Weidel may be, she is nothing if not ambitious.
