Forty-five years old, unanimously elected as the candidate for chancellor of Alternative fuer Deutschland, Alice Weidel, the homosexual leader of the German far right that is frightening Europe, is first and foremost the woman who has never been impressed by the drift of the populist party born as anti-Euro in the Merkel era and ended up increasingly to the right, with openly extremist positions.
The beginnings in the ranks of the AfD
She, an economist, has never abandoned him, clearly showing herself to be different from many predecessors: the various Joerg Meuthen, Frauke Petry, Bernd Lucke, all leaders of the party who have left from time to time, denouncing drifts considered "unacceptable". Born on February 6, 1979 in Kempten, Bavaria, Weidel has become one of the most prominent figures of the AfD, a party known for its far-right and ultra-nationalist positions.
At the helm since 2017, first in a duo with Alexander Gauland, then with Tino Chrupalla, Weidel is conservative starting from her "uniform": always in a blue jacket, white shirt, blond hair tied in a practical chignon, work makeup and the inevitable string of pearls. Repetitive look, but always impeccable. Since 2018 she has been one of the co-leaders of the AfD parliamentary group, together with Alexander Gauland.
The most controversial positions
And yet the profile of the woman who has declared war on gender studies - "we will kick out these professors!" - and on migrants - "if it is called re-migration it will be called re-mi-gra-tion!" - is not without contradictions. Weidel is gay and has a partner who is a Sri Lankan film producer , with whom he lives in Switzerland and raises two children. However, he speaks very little about his private life and keeps his family away from the spotlight. Politically, in recent years, he has clearly suffered from the political strength of the controversial Bjoern Hoecke, the former history professor who animates the most radical fringe of AfD (for him the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin is a "monument of shame") and who had to close the so-called "Fluegel", an even more extremist faction that threatened to divide the party. The secret of Alice's success seems to have been tolerating this thorn in her side, to the point of publicly acknowledging his success in Thuringia last autumn.
Friendship with Elon Musk
In recent weeks, Musk's endorsement of the party - "only AfD can save Germany" - has helped to strengthen it, up to the speech given from the podium in Riesa, Saxony, where he announced that if the AfD is at the helm in Germany, he will seal the country's borders, restart nuclear power plants and tear down wind turbines. But at least on this, Musk, a supporter of renewables as well as atoms, did not agree with her.
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