By Sarah Marsh
BERLIN (Reuters) – Alternative for Germany (AfD) chancellor candidate Alice Weidel is an unlikely public face for a male-dominated, anti-immigration far-right party that presents itself as a defender of family values traditional and ordinary. people.
The 45-year-old is raising two sons with a Sri Lankan-born filmmaker and speaks fluent Mandarin, having earned 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 (ETR:) Global Investors and as an independent consultant before entering politics .
However, Weidel's unusual profile is precisely what makes her an asset to the AfD, political analysts say, giving a party suspected by authorities of being undemocratic a veneer of well-heeled liberal respectability.
She appears more composed and knowledgeable on various subjects than some of her colleagues, they say. Her detractors call her a ruthless opportunist and a “wolf in sheep's clothing.”
“Weidel is someone who can appeal to a wider audience than the typical AfD base, the middle-class bourgeoisie,” said Oliver Lembcke, a political scientist at Bochum University. “She seems to be the adult in the room among all these crazy people and extremists.”
As co-leader of the AfD, Weidel has overseen a surge in support for the party in recent years, benefiting from frustration over Chancellor Olaf Scholz's divisive coalition whose collapse is expected to lead to snap elections on February 23.
The party comes second in the polls with around 17%, behind the conservatives with 33% but far ahead of the Social Democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz with 15%, the Greens with 14% and the Liberal Democrats (FDP) in favor of market with 4%.
This is the first time the AfD has nominated a candidate for chancellor and Weidel has already acknowledged that she is unlikely to enter government for now, given that other parties refuse to work with her .
Weidel expects this firewall to collapse by the 2029 elections because voters clearly want a right-wing coalition, she told German media outlet Compact.
“This will be the decisive year for the AfD,” said Weidel, sporting his dark suit, white shirt and pearls, his blond hair tied in a bun.
NAZI GRANDFATHER
Weidel describes his upbringing as “highly political”, even though his parents did not belong to any party.
His paternal grandfather had been a prominent Nazi judge, Die Welt newspaper reported last month, and the family was expelled from Silesia, now Poland, after World War II.
The youngest of three children, she recalls getting in trouble at school for being too argumentative and having uncomfortable encounters with Middle Eastern immigrants living in tenements social workers in his town in western Germany.
“As a teenager, you don't like going to the outdoor pool anymore when people always call you a 'slut' or something,” she told WeltWoche.
After completing two university studies in parallel, in business and economics, she joined Goldman Sachs, got bored and left for China to do a doctorate on the Chinese retirement system while working as a business consultant.
Weidel joined the AfD in 2013 over its opposition to bailouts during the eurozone crisis – before the party shifted to the right to focus more on tackling immigration.
Her status within the party cost Weidel her friendship circle, prompting the family to move, she told Weltwoche.
Economically liberal, Weidel views the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as her role model and wants Germany to push for a Brexit-style referendum on EU membership if she is unable to sufficiently reform the bloc to make up for its “democratic deficit”.
Skeptical of climate change, she wants to cut taxes, end the minimum wage, reduce government burden and end the costly transition to a carbon-neutral economy.
She also called for much tougher immigration restrictions, exploiting discontent in Germany over mass arrivals from the Middle East in recent years.
“Burqas, girls wearing headscarves, knife-wielding men on government benefits and other good-for-nothings will not guarantee our prosperity,” Weidel told parliament in 2018 in a speech also referencing the theory of popular plot of the “Great Replacement”. among white nationalists.
VERSATILITY
Its strength lies in its versatility, said Hans Vorlaender, a political scientist at the Technical University of Dresden. She acts like a “moderate, well-mannered bourgeois politician” for the established media, but then knows exactly how to reach her more extremist clientele elsewhere, notably on social media.
Weidel acknowledged some friction over his personal lifestyle in a party that opposes same-sex marriage and expanding laws allowing same-sex couples to adopt.
But she is largely unfocused on the question of her identity – refusing to be labeled as homosexual – and is adept at dealing with the different wings of the party in order to maintain her position of power, tolerating rather than repressing the most extreme factions. extremists, Lembcke said.
When same-sex marriage became law in Germany in 2017, she dismissed the issue as insignificant compared to issues such as mass migration.
The same year, Weidel said she was a member of the AfD “not in spite of her homosexuality but because of it”, as it was the only party to address the issue of hostility towards Muslim immigrants towards homosexuals, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper.
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