When the Vice President JD Vance criticized his German hosts last week for his side right -wing parties, he did not mention the alternative for Germany, known as the AFD.
But shortly after speaking at the Munich Conference on Security, in which he stunned the room by comparing democracy in today’s Europe with the totalitarianism of the Soviet era, Mr. Vance met with Alice Weidel, the AFD leader.
Former investment analyst who raises two sons with her wife born in Sri Lanka in Switzerland, Mrs. Weidel, 46, has become a little truly face of AFD. Her nationalist party campaign on a platform that is an antimigrant and defines family as a father and mother who raises children.
Favorite new American administration – receiving approval from Elon Musk – it was crucial to AFD’s efforts to break into the mainstream, helping entertainment to a comfortable second place ahead of Sunday’s national elections.
Mrs. Weidel, whose turtles or shirts with open necklaces and pearl necklaces became signatures, gave more cosmopolitan pictures to fun He has it was connected neo -Nazis and conspiracies to overthrow the state.
But her AfD is no less extreme. “With Alice Weidel at the helm, AFD has been constantly more radical,” said Ann-Katrin Müller, an expert in AFD Who reports to Der SpiegelOne of the most prominent German news.
AFD is surveyed significantly in front of the social democrats left in the center, Chancellor, Olafa Scholz, and behind the conservative Christian Democrats Friedrich Merz, an anterior runner who was the next chancellor.
These parties insist that they will never be a partner with Mrs. Weidel’s party to form a government. But the latest success of Mrs. Weidel in the presentation of AFD because only another party arrived on Sunday, when she joined the television debate with her main rivals, which also included Robert Habeck, running for the greenery.
Mrs. Weidel’s performance was widely rated uneven, but still left the event to the winner – it was the first time AFD had been called to such a discussion and watched by millions of voters. At one point in the campaign, the polls classified her as the most popular chancellor candidate, in all parties.
But if the professors and the personal story of Mrs. Weidel suggest softening the party line, her language does not do so. She promised to demolish wind turbines and reject professors of gender studies. She spoke of “remigrants”, a term used by the end right that is widely interpreted as a deportation code.
“Explain this absolutely the whole world: the German borders are closed,” said the fan audience when AFD officially nominated it as its candidate last month.
Mrs. Weidel refused to talk to the New York Times for this article. In interviews with German informative media, she was alternately charming and bitten.
She consistently refused to distance herself from the most extreme members of her party, some of whom were minimized by the Holocaust and the German Nazi Past.
“She and the people behind her now dominate the party – and they are ideologically very close Björn Höcke“Said Mrs. Müller, referring to the leader of the AFD state Fined judgment for using a Nazi language.
On Sunday, Mrs. Weidel told Bild, the greatest German tabloid, that Mr. Höcke would put in her cabinet if she became a chancellor.
Mrs. Weidel grew up in a Catholic middle-class family in Harsewinkel, a city in the northern Rhine-Zapad, in the west of the country, with two brothers and sisters and a badger. Her father was a seller and her mother was a housewife.
Her grandfather was a Nazi party and was appointed a military judge in the occupied Warsaw, said Die Welt, a conservative diary. Mrs. Weidel replied that she did not know her grandfather, who died when she was 6 years old, and that the Nazi past was never a topic of discussion in her family.
As the doctorate ends. She spent time in China in the Bavaria economy. According to her account, she learned Mandarin. She later worked at Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs as an analyst. In interviews with German informative media, she spoke about her love for Feng Shui, about swimming and tennis when she was a girl.
She officially divides the time between her home in a small town in Central Switzerland and a house in her ballot at Lake Constance, southern Germany. But Mrs. Weidel admitted that she did not spend much time at a German address.
He says it’s because of security problems. Despite the profits of her party, she remains lightning of public anger in a country where most Germans believe that AFD should be avoided.
Her absence from Germany became a slightly painful subject of the leader of the nationalist party. She came out of an interview that aired this week with public television when asked how much she slept at a German address. In the same interview, she admitted that she did not know how many people live in the district he represents as a member of Parliament.
In November, Mrs. Weidel told a group of business leaders in Zurich that her security situation became so difficult that it was difficult to even spontaneously go to dance or dinner with her spouse Sarah Bosard, a filmmaker.
“I am incredibly grateful to my wife for throwing her out,” she said.
Despite being asked repeatedly, Mrs. Weidel refuses to explain how to align the apparent contradiction between her personal life and the vision of the society that her party represents.
“I’m not Queer,” Mrs. Weidel said this summer, using the English word, “but I’m married to a woman I’ve known for 20 years,” she said.
Experts say that the fact that Mrs. Weidel’s personal life defies the Party Orthodoxy actually increases her request to carry an AFD banner and makes the party more.
“Mrs. Weidel has become the party’s face because of his biography and background, and also because of his ability to speak clearly – even if he is without much empathy,” said Werner Patzelt, a political scientist who studied AFD for a long time.
Mrs. Weidel joined the AFD in 2013, when it was a practical party with a single edition built on opposition to a common European currency, before she started becoming candidate for chancellor-pouring party.
Partly thanks to the fact that no one will work with their party, she has never held any government post before. She was elected Parliament for the first time in 2017.
Even before her prominent new role, she was fixing at political discussions on German television. She claims that her party is a libertarian, not a right-wing nationalist, a position that is contrary to some upper members of the AFD.
Her fluid English helped her to build a relationship with Mr. Male, the advisor of the billionaire of President Donald J. Trump, who interviewed Mrs. Weidel on his platform of social media X.
Mr. Musk surprised the party in December when he was Dressed on a large screen, on a campaign in Hallewhere he supported the AFD and told the assembled members that the Germans “focused too much on past guilt.”
Mr. Musk himself aroused the controversy by giving what was widely interpreted as a Nazi greeting to a set of supporters after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
During the interview X, Mr. Musk portrayed Mrs. Weidel as a “very reasonable person” and distanced AFD from the Nazis.
Despite the efforts to diminish associations with the Nazi past, it seems that some believers have missed the message.
While Mrs. Weidel took the stage in Halle, the audience began singing that was not too subtle game in the Nazi slogan, “All for Germany”, a phrase that was once engraved in the knives of Nazi storm soldiers. It is forbidden in Germany.
The audience adjusted it so lightly. “Alice for Germany!” They cried.
Jim Tankersley contribute to reporting.
