When Vice President JD Vance criticized his German hosts last week for sidelining far-right parties, he did not mention by name the Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD.
But soon after his speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he stunned the room by comparing democracy in today’s Europe to Soviet-era totalitarianism, Mr. Vance met with Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD.
A former investment analyst who is raising two sons with her Sri Lankan-born wife in Switzerland, Ms. Weidel, 46, has become the unlikely face of the AfD. Her nationalist party campaigns on a platform that is anti-immigrant and defines family as a father and a mother raising children.
A favorite of the new American administration — receiving an endorsement from Elon Musk — she has been essential to AfD’s effort to break into the mainstream, helping to vault the party into a comfortable second place ahead of Sunday’s national election.
Ms. Weidel, whose turtleneck sweaters or open-collared shirts and pearl necklaces have become signatures, has lent a more cosmopolitan image to a party that has been linked to neo-Nazis and plots to overthrow the state.
But her AfD is no less extreme. “With Alice Weidel at the helm, the AfD has steadily become more radical,” said Ann-Katrin Müller, an expert on the AfD who reports for Der Spiegel, one of Germany’s most prominent news outlets.
The AfD is polling well ahead of the center-left Social Democrats of the incumbent chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and behind the conservative Christian Democrats of Friedrich Merz, the front-runner to be the next chancellor.
Those parties insist that they would never partner with Ms. Weidel’s party to form a government. But Ms. Weidel’s latest success in presenting the AfD as just another party came on Sunday, when she joined a televised debate with her mainstream rivals, who also included Robert Habeck, running for the Greens.
Ms. Weidel’s performance was widely judged to be uneven, but she left the event a winner nonetheless — it was the first time that AfD had been invited to such a debate, watched by millions of voters. At one point in the campaign, polls ranked her as the most popular chancellor candidate, across all parties.
But if Ms. Weidel’s professorial air and personal story suggest a softening of the party line, her language does not. She has promised to tear down wind turbines and to dismiss gender-studies professors. She has spoken about “remigration,” a term used by the far right that is widely interpreted as code for deportations.
“Make it absolutely clear to the whole world: German borders are closed,” she told a cheering crowd when the AfD officially nominated her as its candidate last month.
Ms. Weidel declined to speak to The New York Times for this article. In interviews with the German news media, she has been alternately charming and biting.
She has consistently refused to distance herself from her party’s most extreme members, some of whom have minimized the Holocaust and Germany’s Nazi past.
“She and the people behind her now dominate the party — and they are ideologically very close to Björn Höcke,” Ms. Müller said, referring to an AfD state leader who has been fined by a court for using Nazi language.
On Sunday Ms. Weidel told Bild, Germany’s largest tabloid, that she would put Mr. Höcke into her cabinet if she were to become chancellor.
Ms. Weidel grew up in a middle-class Catholic family in Harsewinkel, a town in North Rhine-Westphalia, in the country’s west, with two siblings and a dachshund. Her father was a salesman and her mother was homemaker.
Her grandfather was a Nazi party member and was named a military judge in occupied Warsaw, Die Welt, a conservative daily, reported. Ms. Weidel responded that she did not know her grandfather, who died when she was 6, and that the Nazi past was never a topic of discussion in her family.
While finishing a Ph.D. in economics in Bavaria, she spent time in China. By her own account, she learned Mandarin. She later worked at Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs as an analyst. In interviews with the German news media, she has spoken about her love of feng shui, and of swimming and tennis when she was a girl.
Officially she divides her time between her home in a small town in central Switzerland and a house in her voting district on Lake Constance, in southern Germany. But Ms. Weidel admitted that she does not spend much time at the German address.
She says it is because of safety concerns. Despite her party’s gains, she remains a lightning rod of public outrage in a country where a majority of Germans believe the AfD should be shunned.
Her absence from Germany has become something of a sore subject for the leader of a nationalist party. She walked out of an interview aired this week with a public broadcaster when she was asked how many nights she had slept at her German address. In the same interview, she admitted she did not know how many people lived in the district she represents as a member of Parliament.
In November, Ms. Weidel told a group of business leaders in Zurich that her security situation had grown so difficult that it was hard even to spontaneously go out dancing or to dinner with her spouse, Sarah Bossard, a filmmaker.
“I am incredibly grateful to my wife for putting up with it,” she said.
Despite having been asked many times, Ms. Weidel refuses to explain how she reconciles the apparent contradiction between her personal life and the vision of society her party represents.
“I am not queer,” Ms. Weidel told an interviewer this summer, using the English word, “but I am married to a woman I have known for 20 years,” she said.
Experts say the fact that Ms. Weidel’s personal life defies party orthodoxy actually enhances her claim to carry the AfD banner and makes the party appear more mainstream.
“Ms. Weidel has become the face of the party because of her biography and her background, and also because of her ability to speak clearly — even if it is without much empathy, ” said Werner Patzelt, a political scientist who has long studied the AfD.
Ms. Weidel joined the AfD in 2013, when it was virtually a single-issue party built on opposition to the common European currency, before working her way up to become its chancellor candidate — the party’s first.
Partially owing to the fact that no one will work with her party, she’s never held any government post before. She was elected to Parliament for the first time in 2017.
Even before her prominent new role, she was a fixture on political debate shows on German television. She argues that her party is libertarian, not right-wing nationalist, a position that puts her at odds with some of the AfD’s more fervent members.
Her fluent English has helped her build a relationship with Mr. Musk, President Donald J. Trump’s billionaire adviser, who interviewed Ms. Weidel on his social media platform X.
Mr. Musk surprised the party in December when he was beamed onto a big screen, at a campaign event in Halle, where endorsed the AfD and told assembled members that Germans had “too much of a focus on past guilt.”
Mr. Musk himself stirred controversy by giving what was widely interpreted as a Nazi salute to a rally of supporters after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
Throughout the X interview, Mr. Musk portrayed Ms. Weidel as “a very reasonable person” and distanced her and the AfD from the Nazis.
Despite efforts to downplay associations with the Nazi past, some party faithful seem to have missed the message.
As Ms. Weidel took the stage in Halle, the crowd started a chant that was a not-too-subtle play on a Nazi slogan, “Everything for Germany,” a phrase once carved on the knives of Nazi storm troopers. It is banned in Germany.
The crowd tweaked it ever so slightly. “Alice for Germany!” they cried.
Jim Tankersley contributed reporting.
