In parliament on January 29, far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) MPs gathered to pose for selfies with party leader Alice Weidel, 46. Weidel, dressed in a white rollneck and navy blazer, gave a reticent but pleased-looking smile at the camera.
Moments earlier, AfD had made history. Votes had an impact on national policy for the first time since they entered the 2017 federal parliament.
The motion to restrict immigration was nonbinding. The fact that the center-right opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which supported it, and the libertarian Free Democratic Party (FDP), who supported it, relied on additional AfD votes to get it approved was what mattered.
Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader, did so in order to overthrow the extreme and the far right.
“Merz was avoiding eye contact, the]ruling] Social Democratic Party (SDP) was furious, the AfD was over the moon, standing on chairs, embracing each other”, Jens Bastian, an economist with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told Al Jazeera.
“It was as if the AfD had scored the goal to win the championship: ‘ We’ve provided a majority. We’ve become acceptable, ‘” he said.
A mentally ill Afghan man had knife-wielding attack on a group of children in a park in Aschaffenburg, near Frankfurt, a city in the west, a week before the election. He killed a two-year-old boy and a 41-year-old man who tried to protect him.
Weeks earlier, a Saudi-born man had rammed a car into a crowd of Christmas shoppers, killing six people in the eastern city of Magdeburg.
Public outcry and calls for tougher immigration reform were sparked by the attacks.
Merz, who is leading in the polls before Sunday’s federal elections and is Germany’s likely next chancellor, “felt he had to do something visibly different”, retired diplomat Christian Schlaga told Al Jazeera, referring to the January 29 vote.
“I believe it is wrong”, former CDU Chancellor Angela Merkel said , on her website.
Merz introduced a legally binding bill to the Bundestag two days after the motion was approved to strengthen border controls, enforcing restrictions on migrants’ ability to bring family members to Germany, and allowing federal police to issue their own arrest warrants. The measure failed.
A dozen CDU MPs turned down their party leader after being criticized for making a “common cause” with the far right.
Weidel was incensed. “Merz doesn’t have what it takes to be chancellor”, she told reporters. “The conservatives aren’t united”.
The CDU’s position in the polls was not affected by last month’s federal collaboration, suggesting that not all Germans are offended by the AfD’s participation in political decisions as the Berlin political elite.
Merz has vowed to never form a coalition with the AfD and Weidel, as did SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
But he seems to be testing the waters of ad hoc collaboration. This is partly born of necessity. In the future, Merz may need AfD votes, particularly to halt immigration.
The AfD, which is currently polling 21 percent, is projected to surpass the CDU in the next Bundestag as Germans prepare to cast ballots. The anti-immigrant AfD’s candidate for chancellor is Weidel. So who is she, and how is she shaping her party?
Rising through the ranks
Weidel, who grew up in a middle-class family in a town in northwest Germany, came to politics after a career in finance. She worked as an analyst for Goldman Sachs and Allianz Global Investors in Frankfurt while studying economics as an undergraduate, earned a doctorate, and has a PhD after finishing her dissertation on China’s pension system. The Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which is affiliated with the CDU, financed her doctoral thesis, which may suggest she started out as a moderate conservative. She owned her own consulting firm before joining the AfD. She divides her time between Switzerland and Germany and is married to a woman of Sri Lankan descent who has two sons.
Weidel quickly rose to the top of the AfD after being founded by a group of eurosceptic academics in late 2013. It was created in opposition to bailouts of nations whose debts have fallen since the eurozone’s collapse. The AfD pushed for what it claimed was regaining German sovereignty from the EU, drawing in anti-globalization reactionaries, nativists, and anti-system supporters of all kinds, including neo-Nazis. Due to her opposition to the bailouts, Weidel was drawn to the AfD before it shifted to immigration.
Weidel served as the party’s federal executive committee by 2015, and she became the party’s parliamentary bloc’s rapporteur after the party re-entered the Bundestag in 2017 and won 12.6% of the federal vote to become the third-largest party. Both in the 2017 and 2021 elections, she was AfD’s co-leader with Tino Chrupalla, an eastern German politician.
Meanwhile, after Greece and other struggling eurozone members had been bailed out and the euro secured, foreign policy choices under Merkel to serve Germany’s economy, the largest in Europe, unravelled.
Under American pressure, a trade agreement of German origin that made it easier to export to China was shelved in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic in the same year doused consumption and shuttered factories.
When unknown actors sabotaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines beneath the Baltic Sea, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 slowed the imports of cheap Russian gas to the energy-intensive German industries.
German energy costs increased as a result of these shocks. The AfD benefited from the inflation that resulted in Scholz’s coalition government.
“Exports to China, cheap imports of energy from Russia – that was the economic model that defined]post-communist German] reunification and the Merkel era. That strategy has been abandoned, and it embodied the character of a prosperous Germany, according to Catherine Fieschi, a fellow at the European University Institute in Paris with a focus on populist politics.
Strategy and staying power
Weidel has blamed globalisation for Germany’s troubles and tapped into voter discontent.
“We have had … incredible growth from 2010 until 2021. Who wants to give that up again”? Schlaga asked, describing how many voters feel.
Weidel was described by Fieschi as “ambitious” and “ready to mutate, do whatever it takes, and find the right conveyor belt to really crack the system” of mainstream German politics.
“Weidel basically has decided the way to get to]power] is to go via a formerly intellectual party, turn it into a populist party, hitch it to the east and then go mainstream from there”, said Fieschi, who sees her as an able strategist.
She supports a return to fossil fuels, criticized Europe’s transition to green energy, and demanded stricter immigration restrictions.
Weidel concentrated much of her campaign efforts in the former East Germany.
The east, which has remained poorer than western Germany since reunification, is a natural “reservoir of votes of dissent,” according to Fieschi, who has been particularly well-known.
But it is also, Fieschi argued, more tolerant of far-right rhetoric than the former West Germany.
“For her supporters in the east, she really doesn’t have to try that hard because in the East German imagination, … Nazism happened in West Germany”, Fieschi said.
“That is pretty strategic thinking, and the strategy totally overtakes the ideas. She said, “The ideas are whatever it takes at any given time.”
As the AfD’s message and identity have expanded from its original focus on the euro to addressing migration, energy, the parlous state of Germany’s armed forces, for which Weidel supports bringing back conscription, and the European project as a whole, Weidel has had the most staying power.
“The party has consumed a lot of founding members”, Bastian said.
In 2022, AfD co-chairman Jorg Meuthen resigned after what he described as a power struggle against the party’s hardliners, who he said included Weidel. After telling an interviewer that not all Nazi SS paramilitary members were criminals, Maximilian Krah, the lead candidate for AfD’s European Parliament ticket, was pressured to resign from the party’s federal executive committee in May. Meanwhile, Weidel has embraced members like Bjorn Hocke, who has twice been found guilty of using a Nazi slogan.
Outwardly, Weidel comports herself professionally, wearing suits and sporting a handkerchief in her breast pocket. She emphasizes her expertise and skill in a professional setting.
“She says, ‘ Yes, I talk to]Chinese President] Xi Jinping in Mandarin. I read the original Chinese policy documents. I understand in which direction China is going, I’ve worked there. ‘ That’s about competence but also foreign policy the other]party leaders] have no answer to”, Bastian said.
She’s also a savvy communicator, reaching young voters on TikTok and X.
One of Weidel’s recent videos shows her hiking in a snow-covered, forested landscape, presenting a wholesome image as she recites the chancellor’s oath. “I swear that I will dedicate my strength to the wellbeing of the German people, to promote their welfare, protect them from harm”, she says in her voiceover,.
She has become AfD’s face. Two-thirds of Germans would not be able to name the other leader”, Bastian said, referring to Chrupalla.
Meanwhile, in an interview with billionaire Elon Musk on X last month, Weidel as the face of the AfD performed a verbal and ideological somersault. The far-right party has tried to distance itself from Nazism, and Weidel’s historical revisionism recast Nazis as “socialists”.
“The biggest success]of the left] after that terrible era in our history was to label Adolf Hitler as right and conservative. He was exactly the opposite. … He was a communist, socialist guy”, Weidel told Musk.
“We are exactly the opposite. We are a libertarian, conservative party. We want to free the people, but we are constantly being wrongly framed.
‘ Saying things ‘ other parties aren’t
Weidel’s gift seems to be channelling dissent and, by voicing it, allowing others to express it.
“Germans need someone to express their anger” over falling living standards, Fieschi said.
Weidel’s positions, which break with political orthodoxy, also implicitly tell German voters it’s not reprehensible to speak their minds, even if what they have to say is negative or politically incorrect.
“Immigration was difficult to touch for parties. She’s making remarks on an issue that other political parties are not going to [admit], according to Christina Xydias, a political scientist at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and author of a book about German female politicians.
Weidel argued at a party rally in Riesa, eastern Germany, last month that a far-right term would be removed and sent back to the country of origin.
“I have to tell you quite honestly, if it’s called remigration, then it’s called remigration”, she thundered.
“The whole audience got up”, Bastian said, describing the audience’s exhilaration. “Remigration. The term went mainstream”.
“There are suggestions that the AfD, if they really want to make a difference, have to go a bit more mainstream, tone down the rough edges”, he said.
“I’m not convinced. Because they don’t do it, the AfD are actually growing. They’re seen as the original, as the authentic, as the ones who are saying it the way it should be said”.
Source: Aljazeera
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