By Sarah Marsh
BERLIN (Reuters) -Alice Weidel, the chancellor candidate of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), is an unlikely public face for a male-dominated, anti-immigration party that depicts itself as a defender of traditional family values and ordinary people.
The 45-year-old is raising two sons with a Sri Lankan-born woman, a filmmaker, and speaks fluent Mandarin, having done a doctorate in economics in China. A west German leading a party that is strongest in the former communist East, she worked for Goldman Sachs and Allianz Global Investors and as a freelance business consultant before entering politics.
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Weidel’s unusual profile, however, is precisely what makes her an asset to the AfD, say political analysts, lending a veneer of well-heeled liberal respectability to a party that is suspected by authorities of being antidemocratic.
Typically sporting a dark suit, white shirt and pearls, she comes across as more poised and competent on various topics than some of her colleagues, they say. Her critics call her a ruthless opportunist and a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”.
“Weidel is someone who can appeal to a broader public than the typical AfD constituency, to the middle class bourgeoisie,” said Oliver Lembcke, political scientist at the University of Bochum. “She seems like the adult in the room among all these lunatics and extremists.”
As AfD co-leader, Weidel has overseen a surge in support for the party in recent years, benefiting from frustration with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s fractious coalition whose collapse is set to result in a Feb. 23 snap election.
The party is polling in second place on around 17%, after the conservatives on 33% but well ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats on 15%, the Greens on 14% and the pro-market Free Democrats (FDP) on 4%.
This is the first time the AfD has nominated a chancellor candidate and Weidel has already acknowledged it is unlikely to enter government for now, given other parties refuse to work with it.
Weidel expects this firewall to crumble by the 2029 election as voters clearly want a right-wing coalition, she told German outlet Compact.
“Voters clearly want a coalition of conservatives and the AfD,” she told reporters in Berlin on Saturday, warning the former of ignoring the voice of millions of voters.
NAZI GRANDFATHER
Weidel describes her upbringing as “highly political”, although her parents did not belong to any party.
Her paternal grandfather was a prominent Nazi judge, Die Welt newspaper reported last month, and the family was expelled from Silesia, now in Poland, after World War Two.
The youngest of three, she recalls getting into trouble at school for being too argumentative as well as having uncomfortable encounters with Middle Eastern immigrants living in social housing in her west German town.
“You don’t enjoy going to the outdoor pool anymore as a teenager when people are always calling you ‘slut’ or some such,” she told WeltWoche.
After getting two university studies in parallel, in business and economics, she joined Goldman Sachs, grew bored and moved to China to do a doctorate on the Chinese pension system while working as a business consultant.
Weidel joined the AfD in 2013 over her opposition to bailouts during the euro zone crisis – before the party shifted rightwards to focus more on fighting immigration.
Her status in the party cost Weidel her friendship circle, prompting the family to move towns, she told Weltwoche.
An economic liberal, Weidel claims late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as her role model and wants Germany to push for a Brexit-style referendum on EU membership if it is unable to sufficiently reform the bloc to fix its “democratic deficit”.
A climate change sceptic, she wants to lower taxes, end the minimum wage, slim down the state and end the costly shift to a carbon neutral economy.
She has also called for much tighter restrictions on immigration, tapping into a well of discontent in Germany with the large-scale arrivals from the Middle East in recent years.
“Burqas, girls in headscarves, knife-wielding men on government benefits and other good-for-nothing people are not going to ensure our prosperity,” Weidel told parliament in 2018 in a speech that also referenced “The Great Replacement” conspiracy theory popular among white nationalists.
VERSATILITY
Her strength lies in her versatility, said Hans Vorlaender, a political scientist at Dresden University of Technology. She acts as a “moderating, well-mannered bourgeois politician” for established media, but then knows exactly how to reach her more extremist clientele elsewhere, in particular on social media.
Weidel has acknowledged some friction over her personal lifestyle in a party that opposes gay marriage and expanding laws to allow same-sex couples to adopt.
But she mostly does not focus on the issue of her identity – refusing to be called queer – and is adept at dealing with different wings of the party in order to maintain her position of power, tolerating rather than reining in the more extremist factions, said Lembcke.
When same-sex marriage became law in Germany in 2017, she dismissed the matter as trivial compared to issues like mass migration.
That same year Weidel said she was in the AfD “not despite her homosexuality but because of it” as it was the only party to address the issue of Muslim immigrants’ hostility towards LGBT+ people, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper.
(Reporting by Sarah MarshEditing by Gareth Jones and Helen Popper)
