Winning the mandate by securing 43% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD has effectively consolidated its position as a front-runner in the next federal elections to be held in 2029. “Mr. Merz, your time has run out,” declared Alice Weidel, the co-leader of Germany’s far-right party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), in a speech in the Bundestag after the party’s resounding victory in the regional elections in the state of Saxony-Anhalt.
The AfD, which espouses hard borders, mass detention facilities, deportation of ‘illegal’ immigrants, remigration, traditional families, Euro-scepticism, German nationalism, and a broader free-market economic policy, has found itself a leader who herself is a walking contradiction when it comes to the values that her party espouses. Ms. Weidel majored in economics and business before joining Goldman Sachs as an analyst. She also worked for the Bank of China, a state-owned Chinese multinational bank, in the late 2000s, living in China for almost six years; she is fluent in Mandarin. Ms. Weidel’s doctoral thesis was on the Chinese pension system. Weidel, have made statements that denounce immigration, especially from Muslim-majority countries, as a whole. Even in her latest victory speech, where she warned Chancellor Friedrich Merz of his coalition government’s end, Ms. After the fall of Nazi Germany, however, he washed his hands of the regime’s crimes, claiming that he did not know anything about the concentration camps. Ms. Weidel has also distanced herself from her grandfather’s legacy. As per Politico , Ms. However, Ms. Weidel has often been dismissive about Germany’s chequered past.
Weidel, before entering politics (she joined the AfD a few months after its formation in 2013), was an economist and banker. Born in 1979 in Gütersloh, West Germany, Ms. In a 2018 speech in the German Parliament, she remarked that “Burqas, girls in headscarves, knife-wielding men on government benefits and other good-for-nothing people are not going to ensure our prosperity, our economic growth and our social welfare system.
Moreover, even though the AfD has said only ‘illegal’ immigrants and criminals should be deported, many leaders of the AfD, including Ms. Weidel claimed that Germany had the largest number of refugees in the world, and that most of them were from “Muslim tribal cultures”. Weidel said she had no knowledge of her grandfather’s Nazi past. “Due to family discord, there was no contact with the grandfather,” a spokesperson for Ms. Weidel said. She once said there was a ‘cult of guilt/shame’ associated with remembering the past. She has remarked that the country’s Nazi past is often “politically instrumentalised” against her party.
