“Closing borders”: – How radical is the AfD candidate for Chancellor Weidel?

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 to the conservative middle class
Behind this image lies a politician whose profile, after years of maneuvering between the camps of the AfD, which is full of right-wing extremists, sometimes seems vague and contradictory. Weidel wants to make her party openly electable to the conservative middle class. In her speech to the AfD delegates in Riesa, she showed that she has also mastered the radical tone.

“German borders are closed”
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 can be called remigration, then it is called remigration,” said Weidel, to cheers from the audience. Germany wants to turn it into a kind of fortress: “The German borders are closed.”

Weidel wants to have all wind turbines in Germany demolished – in Riesa she calls them “windmills of shame”. She also declares war on “queer-woken” tendencies in German universities: “Do I have to say what we do when we are at the helm? We close all gender studies and throw out all these professors.”

Private living conditions
Weidel’s image is made particularly complex by her private life circumstances as a woman raising two children in a lesbian relationship 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 faction leader in the AfD is “surprising at first glance,” political scientist Anna-Sophie Heinze of the University of Trier told AFP. ‘She tries to avoid the issue of homosexuality. When asked about it, she tries to twist it very strongly towards anti-gender and pro-Christian conservative values.”

How radical is she?
So what does Alice Weidel stand for, how radical is she? “In any case, it promotes right-wing radicalism in Germany,” said political professor and AfD expert Wolfgang Schroeder from Kassel to the AFP news agency. Weidel was able to emerge in the AfD because its politics are so flexible: “It fluctuates between a conservative-right and a right-wing radical course.”

Weidel, who has a PhD in economics, cited her opposition to the then German federal government’s euro bailout policy as her reason for joining the newly created AfD in 2013. She had made a career as an employee at an asset manager and an investment bank and lived in China for many years.

Immigration as a central theme
Weidel’s central theme now is the alleged collapse of domestic security due to immigration. In her speech in Riesa, Weidel also polemicized against immigrants, whom she blamed for “civil war-like conditions on the German streets.”

The first nomination of a candidate for chancellor could mark the beginning of a new phase in the AfD. Until now, the party has played the role of fundamental opposition. With the election of Weidel as candidate chancellor, the AfD is now making a clearer claim for political participation than before. “She is the future chancellor,” said co-party leader Tino Chrupalla in Riesa.

AfD is in second place in surveys
National surveys show that the AfD is currently the second strongest party in Germany, but is still far from the desired government participation. Because so far no other party wants to form a coalition with her.