“She has an appeal to the economic conservatives within the AfD, and this gives her some credibility outside the party or at least the more moderate wing of the AfD fellowship,” Markus Ziener, a senior visiting fellow with the nonpartisan German Marshall Fund think tank, told NBC News.
‘A tough person’
Raised in a middle-class family in the northwestern German town of Harsewinkel, Weidel’s father was a salesman and her mother was a homemaker. The youngest of three, she told the Swiss magazine Die Weltwoche that she got into trouble at school for being too argumentative. Although her parents did not belong to any party, she described her upbringing as “highly political,” without mentioning whether they were on the left or right.
But in November, the German broadsheet Welt reported that her grandfather Hans Weidel was made chief judge of the brutal Warsaw military court in 1944 in a document signed personally by Adolf Hitler. Weidel said she did not know her grandfather, who died when she was 6, and he was not “a topic of conversation in the family.”
She joined the AfD shortly after it was founded in 2013 as a movement against the European Union and the euro currency, both of which she has criticized sharply.
After then-Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s doors to more than 1 million refugees in 2015, the AfD, whose leadership by that time Weidel had joined, turned its attention to stronger borders and restrictive migration policies.
The party was able to harness simmering hostilities against both Muslims and foreigners, as well as anti-E.U. sentiment, building a stronghold in the regions that once made up East Germany, where skepticism toward NATO and the country’s support for Ukraine in its war against Russia remains high.
“If you go to east Germany, people will tell you they vote for the AfD no matter what because it’s an anti-establishment thing, an anti-migration thing and a feeling like east Germans need a stronger voice,” Zeiner said.
As AfD has risen, it has had to try to bat away allegations of extremism, including from Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, which has the party’s branches in both Saxony and Thuringia under official surveillance as “proven right-wing extremist” groups.
Among statements that have raised alarm was one by Alexander Gauland, the party’s co-founder and a current member of parliament, who previously dismissed Hitler’s dictatorship as a “speck of bird poop” in Germany’s history.
A powerful party leader in the east, Björn Höcke, was fined twice last year by German courts for using the Nazi-era slogan “Everything for Germany” at AfD events, and had argued that he was not aware that Nazi storm troopers had used the phrase, according to German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. He has also suggested it’s time for the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. He is appealing the rulings.
And before June’s European Parliament elections, the party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, was forced to withdraw from campaigning after telling an Italian newspaper that the SS, the Nazis’ main paramilitary force, were “not all criminals.”
The AfD has repeatedly rejected the accusations of extremism.
Weidel herself disputed the idea that the AfD shared any affinity with the country’s Nazi past in an interview with Musk on his X platform last month, suggesting her party’s libertarian views contrasted with those of Hitler, who she said had nationalized Germany’s economy.
“He wasn’t a conservative. He wasn’t a libertarian. He was a communist socialist guy,” she said of the former Nazi leader, who is better known for exterminating people he considered outsiders, rather than his economic policies.
The statement also employed a common far-right misrepresentation of Hitler, who in fact privatized much of the government, outlawed labor unions and ordered the killing of hundreds of thousands of people presumed to be socialists and communists.
Comparing Weidel to her self-declared hero, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, professor Werner J. Patzelt, the research director at the right-leaning Belgium-based think tank MCC Brussels, said in a telephone interview last week that she had “imposed discipline” on the party.
“She is a tough person,” he said, adding that she had “started as a critic of the right wingers within the party, but then she made her peace with them and was able to integrate them.”
Heading into this month’s election, he said, there were “no internal conflicts” or policy differences between either the leadership or the wider party itself.
Despite winning the second-highest share of votes in Germany’s election last month, Weidel will not be invited to help form a government with the leading Christian Democratic Union, headed by Friedrich Merz, following a long-standing agreement between German parties to maintain a “firewall” against the far right and refuse to work with the AfD.
If the AfD can avoid mistakes in the short term, “then her future depends on whether other parties can form a government,” Patzelt said, adding that the AfD rank and file would “tolerate her as long as she brings success to the party.”
“Sometimes, people are not the same as the rest of the party,” he added. “They come as surprises.”
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