Hitler was terrible because he was a Communist and we can tell this because he nationalised all of the important industries. As for today’s Jews, they are extremely vulnerable to Muslim crime and are best protected by the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
These were the key takeaways when Alice Weidel, the AfD candidate to become chancellor, held a public love-in with Elon Musk last month. Their conversation, broadcast on X, was billed as an interview, but it wasn’t that. This was a business arrangement; the richest man in the world endorsing one of Europe’s most extreme right wing parties and its co-leader paying due homage to him.
“This is a new situation for me, in which I’m not interrupted or negatively framed,” Weidel said nervously when asked to summarise what her party stands for.
Once they had got into their stride, once she had got over Musk mispronouncing her name as both Veedel and Weedel, they indulged in mutual denunciations of all things “left wing”. That comprised Angela “she ruined our country” Merkel, “Muslim criminals”, a bureaucracy that stifles enterprise and the “woke mind virus”.
Throughout her curious career, Weidel has done whatever it takes to get ahead and get noticed, a woman of artfully manufactured convictions that adjust to the requirements of the moment. She has knifed party rivals in the back and others in the front, to ease herself into the top slot. Yet no matter how hard she tries to please those who matter, she makes an incongruous fit.
As Melanie Amann, deputy editor of Der Spiegel, put it, when Weidel first rose to prominence: “How can a lesbian woman raising two children together with her partner even bear the existence of a party that disparages gays and lesbians as an ‘outspoken minority’? And how can an economist who has a residence in Switzerland, who has lived in China for years and has worked for globally networked companies beat the drum for a party that wants to preserve Germany’s national ‘identity’ and seal its borders?”
You may well ask, but beyond disparaging laughter at the stupidity of the question, you will invariably not get an answer from Weidel herself. And in her conversation with Musk, the tech mega-bro who represents the small-state, low-tax wing of the Trumpian project, the question about the deep contradiction between Alice Weidel’s person and her politics never arose. Instead, the two ululated about being “conservative libertarians”, railing against the role of the state.
There is nothing particularly eye-catching about Alice Elisabeth Weidel – except the fact that her grandfather, Hans, was a prominent Nazi judge. Her father, Gerhard, was a sales rep, and she was born in 1979 in her mother’s home town of Gütersloh and brought up in Versmold, two unremarkable towns in the centre of Germany. Classmates remember her as “dominant” and sometimes arrogant – but these are attributes often disproportionately used against women.
Young “Lille”, as was her nickname, didn’t seem to let it get to her. She did well at school, and in 2004 earned top grades at the University of Bayreuth. From there she moved effortlessly to Goldman Sachs Asset Management, which she described as a “dream employer”.
She didn’t stay long – a trait she would demonstrate throughout her corporate career – moving on to Allianz Global Investors, and then six years in China, where she worked on a PhD before joining the Bank of China.
She ended up – bizarrely – in the small town of Bad Rothenfelde in Lower Saxony, at a company specialising in meat refinement and animal feed. A junior manager at the firm, Heristo, had been to high school with her. Again, she didn’t stay long.
Nor does that period seem to make much sense. From that point on, she worked as a self-employed consultant for start-ups. After a bright start, why did her career seem to stall?
It was at this time, in 2013, that she joined the AfD, enthused by its hostility to the euro. (It is often forgotten that the roots of the party lay in Euroscepticism). She rose quickly up the ranks, joining its executive committee in 2015 and becoming co-lead candidate in the 2017 elections.
She didn’t hide her sexuality; nor did she want to talk about it. Yet she realised early on that she did need to bring it out into the open, if only to enable her to close it down again.
Mariam Lau, a journalist at Die Zeit who covers the German right, says that Alexander Gauland, her co-leader and rival at the time, talked about many furious letters he received from party members asking him why “someone like her” was at the top of the party.
In April 2017, at a party congress in Cologne, she addressed the issue head-on for the first time. Or rather she didn’t. Or she did, but in her own way. She used sarcasm.
How could someone like her be in a party like this? “I am a HOMOSEXUAL,” she told the audience, emphasising the word slowly, pulling a fake-shocked face and starting to laugh.
“She wants to have full control over what journalists write about her and seeks to avoid constantly reminding her party of how different she is,” Lau notes.
The far right in several European countries, such as in the Netherlands, have repurposed and instrumentalised gay rights to create support for anti-immigration positions. In May 2016, Weidel ostentatiously cancelled a planned meeting with the head of the Central Council of Muslims. She wanted to have nothing to do with “confessed supporters of sharia law” who had not distanced themselves from “stone age practices”. She regularly uses the term “Muslim gangs”, once proclaiming: “As a woman, I want to be able to take the last train home at night without fear.”
In its manifesto, which Weidel helped to oversee, the AfD doubles down on traditional gender roles. It refers to “politically motivated programmes” having “no place in schools”. As for trans rights, she told a TV interviewer, the “pop culture of a minority is being promoted while parents ask themselves how to protect their children from it in kindergartens and schools.”
Away from the light and heat of the culture war, the AfD’s manifesto for the February 23 elections is light on other policy matters, particularly when it comes to economics, which is perhaps not surprising given that the far right across Europe and the US is so confused. The AfD talks of freeing the labour market from “unnecessary restrictions” and reforming the basic minimum income to incentivise work.
But beyond calling for more child support (the far right’s obsession with the falling birthrate among “real Germans”), it advocates little more than tinkering with the social market economy, which has been the bedrock of postwar German society. Even at the peak of global free market hegemony in the 1990s and 2000s, Germans were suspicious of Anglo-Saxon “liberal” economic policies. It is tricky ground for Weidel, who’s much more comfortable discussing narrower, more ideologically provocative subjects. She yelped appreciatively at each and every one of Musk’s musings when they appeared together.
California, he informed the audience, had legalised crime, and thefts of below $1,000 are no longer investigated, let alone prosecuted. Germany, Weidel countered, had lost track of 57% of all migrants. Suffice to say, nobody can find stats to back up either assertion.
But in this not-so-new world of fake news and parallel universes, the truth is a flexible friend. Weidel tickled Musk’s ego enough so that he told Germans to vote for her party. “Only the AfD,” Musk declared portentously, “can save Germany. End of story.”
Shortly after his conversation with Weidel, Musk appeared at an AfD rally, his huge face projected on to a screen on stage. “I think you really are the best for Germany,” he told the 4,000 supporters. He then remarked that, in Germany, there is “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that”. He made these remarks two days before Holocaust Memorial Day, which this year was also the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
Last weekend Weidel complained in a TV interview that Nazi atrocities were being brought up as a stick to beat her party. “I find it quite disturbing when the Holocaust is politically instrumentalised,” she moaned, describing it as “annoying”.
How much of a boost will association with Musk give the AfD? Opinion polls in Germany, which (famous last words) have tended to be reasonably accurate, have the party on 20%, a figure that is staggering in a historical context. The postwar constitution introduced a 5% hurdle back in the day, believing that would be enough to keep extremist groups out of the Bundestag and regional parliaments.
But that is no longer the case – Weidel’s party has built itself a solid support base that has not been put off by some extremely dubious AfD election posters. One shows a white German family, kids in the middle, parents on either side. The adults are both shown raising their arms at a 45-degree angle, fingers outstretched and touching over the children’s heads. On the one hand they appear to be recreating the outline of the roof of a house – on the other, both adults are performing a Nazi salute. The visual double entendre is perfectly clear.
Polling numbers have shifted only a little since mid-November, when Olaf Scholz had his hissy fit with the leader of the Free Democrats, one of his coalition partners, and dissolved his own government. The Christian Democrats of Friedrich Merz continue to be far in the lead, with over 30%. The AfD is second. By contrast, Scholz’s Social Democrats and the Greens languish in the mid-teens.
There are ample reasons for caution. First comes the obvious point that pollsters are increasingly wrong. They are keen on a methodology that factors in “silent” AfD voters and maintain that they are not understating its appeal. “Mal sehen,” as Germans would say. We shall see.
Even if the polling figures are correct, the influence of the global far right is already infecting mainstream politics. Merz has made sure that his party bears no resemblance to the “welcome culture” of Merkel of 2015, when she allowed in one million migrants. The SPD and Greens are also talking tough. Everyone is looking over their shoulder at Donald Trump, mindful that during his first term he reserved a particular antipathy towards Germany. As for Ukraine, solidarity is not what it was.
Then comes the Austria example. What happens if post-election coalition negotiations founder? Scholz’s “traffic light” coalition disintegrated because the protagonists couldn’t work with each other. That’s what happened over the border, leaving Austria’s president no choice but to invite the far right FPÖ to try to form the next government.
Could that happen here? Could the “firewall” designed to keep out the AfD finally collapse?
Europe already has to contend with Viktor Orbán in Hungary, his mini-me Robert Fico in Slovakia, Giorgia Meloni in Italy (though some claim she has softened into a mainstream conservative), and it has Geert Wilders pulling the strings in the Netherlands. Austria is probably next, followed by the Czech Republic. France is in crisis. What chance Weidel? It is still remote, but is it out of the question?
Weidel is currently the public face of the AfD. In a party that contains out-and-out Nazi sympathisers alongside populists in the mould of, say, Marine Le Pen or Nigel Farage, she used to be seen as belonging to its moderate wing.
But these terms are increasingly redundant. In an era when the extreme is the new mainstream, when truth is whatever you want it to be, this outsider-turned-insider seems determined to install herself at the heart of German politics for some time to come.
John Kampfner is the author of In Search of Berlin and Why the Germans Do it Better
