Germany elections: 5 things to know about Alice Weidel, face of Germany’s divisive far-right party AfD

Elon Musk in January hosted a live-streamed chat with Weidel on X, where he lavished praise on the party and endorsed her as the “leading candidate to run Germany”.

US Vice-President JD Vance met Weidel on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, which had barred the AfD from attending. Vance had criticised this exclusion, and said “…when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them.”

Here is what to know about Weidel, whom The New York Times once called “a study in contradictions.”

1. 01

   An economist

   The 46-year-old Weidel was born and raised in a middle-class Catholic family in North Rhine-Westphalia in West Germany. Her father was a salesman and her mother was a homemaker.

   She graduated with a degree in economics and business administration from the University of Bayreuth, and had a brief stint with Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt. She later worked at the Bank of China for six years in China, where she learned Mandarin. She subsequently got a PhD in Economics with a scholarship from the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, the Christian Democratic Party’s foundation. Her thesis was on the future of the Chinese pension system.

   She joined the AfD in 2013, the year it was founded. At the time, the Electoral Alternative 2013, as it was called, was a band of German economists protesting the then-German government’s decision to bail out poorer European countries from the Eurocrisis. The crisis which unfolded in 2009 led to many European countries struggling to pay off debts they had accumulated over the years.

   Weidel, an economic liberal, views former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a role model. “Thatcher took over Great Britain when the country was economically in the dumps and built it up again,” she told Bild am Sonntag in 2017. Thatcher, known as the Iron Lady of Britain had advocated for free markets and minimal state intervention.

   She has called for lowering taxes and the abolition of inheritance tax.

2. 02

   Nazi heritage

   An investigative report by the German Sunday newspaper, Welt am Sonntag, revealed that her grandfather Hans Weidel was a prominent Nazi judge appointed directly by Adolf Hitler to sentence people opposed to the Third Reich.

   While Weidel has insisted she did not know her grandfather, who died when she was a child, her party has endorsed a revisionist stance on the subject of Nazism. The party believes that Germany had spent too many years ‘over-compensating’ for Nazi-era crimes. This view has been echoed by prominent party leaders over the years: Alexander Gauland in a 2017 lecture called the Nazi era “a brief stain in Germany's otherwise grand history”. More recently, Weidel called Hitler a “communist” and “anti-semitic socialist” in her chat with Musk last month.

   She has also participated in revisionist commentary around the Holocaust, saying she found it “quite disturbing when the Holocaust is politically instrumentalised”.

   These views have resonated with the AfD’s core voter base, primarily white men without college degrees. At a recent voting rally, supporters chanted “Alice for Germany”, a play on the banned “Everyone for Germany”  slogan of the Nazi Party.

3. 03

   Female partner, but “not queer”

   Weidel is in a civil partnership (akin to a registered marriage) with Sri Lankan-born filmmaker, Sarah Bossard, and the pair have two children. The family lives in Switzerland. In a past interview, she said, “I am not queer but I am married to a woman I have known for 20 years.”

   She has sought to dismiss any curiosity about her partnership status, given her status as the  LGBT+ politician heading the far-right party. The AfD has long defended the traditional nuclear family model, is opposed to abortion and does not support “alternative” lifestyles. Weidel has downplayed this inexplicable distinction, and instead describes a family as a unit “where there are children.”

   Weidel has instead tried to frame this as a case to expel Muslim immigrants from the country, over their perceived opposition to LGBT+ people.

4. 04

   Remigration as a key plank

   The AfD’s opposition to immigration became prominently known in 2015 when it campaigned on this plank in regional elections countrywide, raising alarm over the influx of refugees seeking asylum in Germany. Over the following years, the party has doubled down on this stance, toying with controversial views like The Great Replacement, a widely-debunked racist theory that claims white Americans and Europeans are being actively “replaced” by non-white immigrants. Weidel herself referenced this in a 2018 speech to Parliament, saying “Burqas, headscarf girls and subsidised knifemen and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth and, above all, the welfare state.”

   Today, the AfD advocates remigration, the forced deportation of immigrants and their European-born descendants not deemed “ethnically” European by ethno-nationalists to the home countries of their ancestors.

   This is a position that has recently evolved – in 2024, the party sought to distance itself from the revelation that some of its members had attended a secret meeting on remigration in Potsdam, where neo-Nazis were present. Addressing a rally in January, Weidel said, “I have to be honest with you: if it’s going to be called remigration, then that’s what it’s going to be: remigration.”

5. 05

   Other views

   In line with established AfD policy, Weidel promises Dexit, a referendum akin to Brexit, to remove Germany from the European Union and the currency.

   She is also a climate change sceptic who calls for the increased use of fossil fuels and ending the costly transition to a carbon-neutral economy.