"Borders tight":

How radical is AfD chancellor candidate Weidel?

Alice Weidel will be the AfD's lead candidate in the Bundestag election campaign.

(Bild: AFP)

For Alice Weidel, it is the highlight of her political career so far: on Saturday, the delegates at the AfD national party conference unanimously elected the 45-year-old as the first female candidate for chancellor in the history of the AfD. The politician polarizes: An icy sharpness in her choice of words and appearance characterize Weidel's public image. 

Weidel is now the undisputed number one in a notoriously troubled party that has often made life difficult for its leaders.

Weidel wants to make the AfD electable for the conservative middle class
Behind this image lies a politician whose profile sometimes appears blurred and contradictory after years of maneuvering between the camps of the AfD, which is riddled with right-wing extremists. Weidel wants to make her party electable for the conservative middle class. In her speech to the AfD delegates in Riesa, however, she showed that she is also a master of the radical tone.

(Bild: AFP)

"German borders are sealed"
 In her speech, she explicitly adopted the term "remigration", which is popular among right-wing extremists and describes the mass expulsion of people with a migration background: "If it's called remigration, then it's called remigration," said Weidel to cheers from the delegates. She wants to turn Germany into a kind of fortress: "Germany's borders are sealed."

Weidel wants to have all wind turbines in Germany torn down - in Riesa she spoke of "windmills of shame". She also declares war on "queer-woke" tendencies at German universities: "Shall I say what we'll do when we're at the helm? We'll close down all gender studies and kick out all these professors."

Private living conditions
Weidel's image is made particularly complex by her private living conditions as a woman raising two children in a lesbian partnership with a Sri Lankan-born woman. As a woman in a male-dominated party, Weidel is an exception.

Weidel's rise to party and parliamentary group leader in the AfD is "surprising at first glance", says political scientist Anna-Sophie Heinze from the University of Trier to AFP. "She is trying to steer away from the issue of homosexuality. When she is asked about it, she tries to turn it very strongly in the direction of anti-gender and pro-Christian conservative values."

How radical is she?
So what does Alice Weidel stand for, how radical is she? "At the very least, she is promoting right-wing radicalism in Germany," says Kassel politics professor and AfD expert Wolfgang Schroeder to the AFP news agency. Weidel has been able to rise in the AfD because she is so politically flexible: "She oscillates between a conservative right-wing and a radical right-wing course."

Dermo against the AfD

(Bild: AFP)

As a reason for joining the newly founded AfD in 2013, Weidel, who holds a doctorate in economics, cited her opposition to the euro bailout policy of the German government at the time. She had made a career as an employee of an asset manager and an investment bank and had lived in China for years.

Immigration as a central theme
Weidel's central theme is now the alleged collapse of internal security as a result of immigration. In her speech in Riesa, Weidel also polemicized against immigrants, whom she blamed for "civil war-like conditions on German streets".

Alice Weidel will be the AfD's lead candidate in the Bundestag election campaign.

(Bild: AFP)

The first nomination of a female candidate for chancellor may mark the beginning of a new phase in the AfD. Up to now, the party has enjoyed the role of fundamental opposition. With Weidel's nomination as candidate for chancellor, the AfD is now staking a clearer claim to political participation than ever before. "She is the future chancellor," said co-party leader Tino Chrupalla in Riesa.

AfD in second place in polls
In nationwide polls, the AfD is currently the second strongest party in Germany - but far from the government participation it is aiming for. So far, no other party wants to form a coalition with it.