In the male-dominated AfD, she is an exceptional figure: Alice Weidel is expected to be re-elected on Saturday at the AfD’s federal party congress in Erfurt, alongside co-chair Tino Chrupalla. Weidel sits unchallenged in the saddle — and that in a party that has often given its leaders a hard time. In public, however, the AfD politician polarizes: icy sharpness in her word choice and demeanor defines Weidel’s public image.
Weidel’s appearance is deliberately bourgeois: classic suits, strings of pearls, hair tightly pulled back. Behind this image lies a politician whose profile, after years of maneuvering between the camps within an AfD permeated by right-wing extremists, appears blurred and inconsistent.
The picture becomes even more complex due to Weidel’s private life as a woman who lives in a lesbian partnership with a Sri Lankan-born woman and raises two children — thus living in opposition to the traditional family image favored by her own party.
Political Science Professor: Weidel Has Radicalized
What does Alice Weidel stand for, then, and how radical is she? Chemnitz political science professor Benjamin Höhne notes that under Weidel’s leadership the AfD has undergone a “radicalization trajectory” in recent years and increasingly operates with a “right-wing extremist worldview.”
“Weidel is the strategic brain; she presents herself as the strong woman of the AfD,” Höhne tells AFP. She deliberately sets herself apart from her co-chair Chrupalla. “At the top of the AfD there is a division of labor,” Höhne says. “Chrupalla speaks in a language that resonates with non-academics.”
Her entry into the newly founded AfD in 2013 was motivated by her opposition to the euro-rescue policy of the government at that time. As an employee of a wealth-management firm and an investment bank, she had built a career, and spent years living in China.
Today, Weidel’s central theme is the alleged collapse of internal security as a result of immigration. In her Bundestag speeches, she regularly pummels migrants. She speaks with cold contempt of “knife-wielding men” and “headscarf girls.”
A Lesbian in the Fight Against LGBTQ Rights
With her uncontested selection as the AfD’s first chancellor candidate in the 2025 election, Weidel demonstrated that within the party — despite the dual leadership — she is the number one. Her rise in the male-dominated AfD is quite surprising. Only 13 percent of the AfD faction in the Bundestag are women. In the 15-member national board, Weidel is the only woman — and one who is openly lesbian.
“That shows double standards within the AfD,” says political science professor Höhne. “Gender equality is certainly not a topic for the AfD, and they campaign against LGBT people.”
Even sharper about the paradox of Weidel is Green Party member Nyke Slawik, a Bundestag deputy and queer policy spokesperson, who tells AFP, “She is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” “From the perspective of many people in Germany’s queer community, Alice Weidel is above all someone who mocks her own community and those who fought for her right to marry.” The AfD is “actively working against the acceptance of people who love people of the same sex,” says the trans woman.
Weidel generally shrugs off being asked about her lesbian identity. “I’m not queer; I’m with a woman I’ve known for 20 years,” she once said (TheColu.mn reported). The AfD also uses Weidel as a kind of fig leaf — arguing that a party led by a lesbian chairwoman and chancellor candidate cannot possibly be discriminatory.
Chemnitz political science professor Höhne is not convinced. “While attitudes toward gender have shifted somewhat even in the far-right parties,” Höhne tells AFP, “it is to be feared: if right-wing extremism fully asserts itself as the AfD’s guiding ideology, the seed of liberalism could die — along with an open hatred of homosexuals and a return to traditional gender roles for women.”
