When Vice President JD Vance criticized the German host last week for standing by the far-right party, he did not mention by name the German alternative known as the AFD.
But shortly after his speech at the Munich security conference, he surprised the room by comparing today's European democracy with Soviet-era totalitarianism, and Vance met with AFD leader Alice Weidel. There was.
Weidel, 46, a former investment analyst who raises two sons along with his wife, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, has become an unlikely face of AFD. Her Nationalist Party is campaigning on a platform that defines a family as a child raising a father and mother.
A new American administration favorite, supported by Elon Musk, she was crucial to the AFD's efforts to help push the party into a comfortable second place ahead of Sunday's national elections and invade the mainstream. .
Signed by a turtleneck sweater, open-collar shirt and pearl necklace, Weidel has lent a more cosmopolitan image to a party linked to the neo-Nazi and plot to overthrow the state.
However, her AFD is not so extreme. “AFD has steadily become radicalized as Alice Weidel is at the helm,” says AFD expert, reporting on Der Spiegel, one of Germany's most well-known news outlets. said Ann-Katrin Müller.
The AFD votes behind the Social Democrats on the centre-left of incumbent Prime Minister Olaf Scholz and the conservative Christian Democrats of frontrunner Friedrich Merz, who will become the next prime minister.
These parties claim they will not partner with Weidel's party to form a government. But the latest success in presenting Weidel's AFD as another party joined in a televised debate Sunday with her mainstream rivals, including Robert Habeck, who will run for the Greens. Ta.
Although Weidel's performance was widely judged to be mean, she still left the event to the winner. At one point in the campaign, the poll ranked her as the most popular prime ministerial candidate among all parties.
But if Weidel's professor's atmosphere and personal story suggest that the party line will soften, then her language is not. She promised to demolish the wind turbine and fire a professor of gender studies. She spoke about “send back,” a term used by the far right, which is widely interpreted as a code of deportation.
“Make sure to make it clear to the whole world: the German border is closed,” she told a cheering crowd last month when the AFD officially appointed her as a candidate.
Weidel refused to speak to the New York Times for this article. In an interview with German news media, she is alternately engaging and biting.
She has consistently refused to distance herself from the party's most extreme members, some of which have kept the past of the Holocaust and the Nazis in Germany to a minimum.
“She and the people behind her now control the party — and they're ideologically very close to Björn Höcke,” Muller said.
On Sunday, Weidel told Build, Germany's largest tabloid, that he would put Hecke in the cabinet when he becomes prime minister.
Weidel grew up in a middle-class Catholic family in Hersewinkel, a town in North Rhine Westphalia, in the west of the country where his two brothers and a dachshund are located. Her father was a salesman and her mother was a housewife.
Her grandfather was a member of the Nazi Party and reported that she was appointed military judge for Die Walsaw, a conservative daily walt. Weidel replied that he had no idea about her grandfather, who passed away when she was six, and that the Nazi past was not a topic of discussion in her family.
In Bavarian economics while earning her PhD, she spent time in China. On her own account, she studied Mandarin. She later worked as an analyst for Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs. In an interview with German news media, she talked about her love for Feng Shui and her swimming and tennis when she was a girl.
Officially, she divides her time between a house in a small town in central Switzerland and a house in the voting district of Lake Constance in southern Germany. However, Weidel admitted that she didn't spend much time on her German speech.
She says it's because of safety concerns. Despite her party's interests, she remains a lightning bolt of rage in the nation's public, who believe that the majority of Germans should avoid AFD.
Her absence from Germany has become a painful subject for nationalist leaders. She came out of an interview that aired with a public broadcaster this week when asked how many nights she was at an address in Germany. In the same interview, she admitted that she had no idea how much she lived in the district she represented as a member of the council.
In November, Weidel told a group of Zurich business leaders that she was having difficulty going out to dance spontaneously and having dinner with filmmaker Sarah Bossard. Ta.
“I'm extremely grateful to my wife for putting up with it,” she said.
Despite being asked many times, Weidel refuses to explain how she reconciliates the obvious contradictions between her personal life and the vision of society her party represents. I will.
“I'm not strange,” Weidel told interviewers this summer using English language. “But I've been married to a woman I've known for 20 years,” she said.
Experts say the fact that Weidel's personal life ignores party legitimacy really bolsters her claim to carry AFD banners, making the party more mainstream.
“MS. Weidel became the face of her party, even if it didn't really empathize with her, because of her biographies and her background, and because of her clear speaking ability,” he said. said Werner Patzelt, a political scientist who has been studying AFD for a long time.
Weidel joined the AFD in 2013. This took part in 2013, when it was a single issue party built against the general European currency before working to become the first candidate for the party, a prime ministerial candidate.
In part, she has never held a government post before due to the fact that no one works with her party. She was first elected to Congress in 2017.
Even before her prominent new role, she was a fixture for a show of political debate on German television. She argues that her party is a libertarian rather than a right-wing nationalist, and is a position that opposes her with some of the more passionate members of the AFD.
Her fluent English helped her develop a relationship with Musk, the billionaire adviser to President Donald J. Trump.
Musk surprised the party when it hit the big screen at a campaign event in Halle in December, where he supported the AFD, and assembled members said the Germans were “too focusing on past guilt.” “He said.
Musk himself stoked the controversy after Trump took office by giving supporter rally what was widely interpreted as a Nazi salute.
Throughout an interview with X, Musk portrayed Weidel as a “very reasonable person” and distanced her and AFD from the Nazis.
Despite efforts to underestimate associations with the Nazi past, some parties seem to have missed the message.
When Weidel took the stage in Halle, the crowd began a less subtle play, a chant, with the Nazi slogan “Everything for Germany.” It is prohibited in Germany.
The crowd tweaked it a little. “Alice of Germany!” They wept.
Gym Tankery Reports of contributions.
