The right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has chosen Alice Weidel as its leading candidate in the upcoming snap elections scheduled for February 23rd next year.
The 45-year-old co-leader of the party said she would restore Germany’s ailing economy, reverse its climate policies, and severely reduce migration.
Weidel is an economist from the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. She worked for Goldman Sachs and the Bank of China and lived in China for six years, where she learnt to speak Mandarin. She now lives in Switzerland with her female partner, who is from Sri Lanka, and with whom she has two adopted children.
Weidel has described former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher as her political role model. She said she was “impressed by her biography, her swimming against the tide even when things get unpleasant.”
This is the first time that the anti-immigration party, which was founded 11 years ago, has officially decided to nominate a candidate to run for the position of chancellor.
The move follows the AfD’s regional electoral successes in September, when the party won its first-ever state election in Thuringia and finished second in Saxony and Brandenburg.
The AfD’s upswing in popularity is reflected in nationwide polls as well, with the party set to take the runners-up spot in February, with a predicted vote share of 19%.
In another poll, Weidel is the second-most-popular candidate for chancellor, with voters naming opposition leader Friedrich Merz as their favoured choice polling at 21% and Weidel as their second choice at 18%.
The party has been able to capitalise on the failures of the current left-liberal coalition government: voter concerns about the influx of illegal migrants, a rise in crime, high inflation, and soaring energy prices have turned many people against the parties in power, leading voters to instead flock to the centre-right CDU/CSU alliance, the AfD, and the left-wing nationalist Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht.
All of these parties have promised stricter asylum laws and a U-turn on the radical climate policies that have resulted in higher energy prices and the shutting down of Germany’s nuclear power plants.
As Weidel said at her press conference on Saturday:
We have twenty years of grand coalitions and “traffic light” coalitions behind us, and we have crashed. Our country is no longer what it used to be. We were a country with the safest and cheapest energy supply. We were a prosperous country that our grandparents and parents had built up. We are no longer there.
In its recently unveiled election manifesto, the AfD vowed to sharply curb immigration, deport illegal immigrants, turn nuclear power plants back on, exit the European Union—unless it carries out major reforms—and end arms deliveries to Ukraine. The manifesto also highlights the party’s desire to preserve freedom of speech and to get rid of the law that allows for the punishment of journalists and ordinary citizens who dare to criticise government officials.
On Saturday, Weidel said, “we are the second strongest force in the nationwide polls, and from that we clearly derive a claim to government.”
The party also laid claim to government after the regional elections in the state of Thuringia, but all other parties in Germany refuse to cooperate with the AfD, which has been officially designated a “suspected extremist organisation” by the country’s domestic intelligence agency.
The party will most likely be shunned following the national elections as well, leaving the CDU/CSU (which is currently polling at 32%) with no other alternative but to revive its grand coalition with the Social Democrats (16%).
