Alice Weidel

Alice Weidel (born February 6, 1979, Gütersloh, West Germany) is a German politician. She is the cochair of the country’s main far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), and a member of Parliament. Since her first run for office in 2017, she has successfully helped broaden the AfD’s appeal among German voters.

Early life and career

Weidel was born in Gütersloh, in west-central Germany. She grew up in the town of Harsewinkel, where her father worked as a salesman and her mother was a homemaker. The family was Roman Catholic. Her paternal grandfather, Hans Weidel, who died when she was six, had been a prominent Nazi judge, appointed directly by Adolf Hitler. Alice Weidel has said her grandfather’s association with the Nazis was never discussed in her household.

Weidel received degrees in business and economics at the University of Bayreuth, graduating near the top of her class. She spent six years in China, where she learned Mandarin, wrote a Ph.D. thesis on the country’s pension system, and worked for the Bank of China. When she returned to Germany, she worked for Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt.

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Weidel and her partner, a Sri Lankan-born filmmaker named Sarah Bossard, have been in a relationship for about 20 years. Weidel has said that in the early 2010s, Bossard became so tired of her rants about German politics that she encouraged Weidel to get involved and act on her concerns. Weidel joined Germany’s far-right party AfD in 2013, the year it was founded. At the time its main issues were opposing the European Union and the euro. She gradually rose to the top of the leadership structure.

Rising through the political ranks

In 2015 then chancellor Angela Merkel allowed more than one million refugees to enter Germany. There was a significant backlash, and the AfD began to champion restrictive immigration policy. Weidel went along with this shift; more recently she has promoted what she calls “remigration,” a term used by the German right that is widely understood as a euphemism for deportation.

In 2017 the AfD’s leader, Frauke Petry, resigned during internal disputes—and Weidel and an ally, Alexander Gauland, assumed the top positions. In Germany’s parliamentary elections that September, the AfD came in third, and Weidel began serving as a legislator.

The AfD has become more radical since then, and some of its prominent members have openly used Nazi language and downplayed the Holocaust. Weidel has not used this rhetoric herself but has refused to distance herself from party figures who do. In 2025 she told the newspaper Bild that if she became chancellor, she could imagine Björn Höcke, an AfD leader who has been fined for using Nazi slogans, serving in her cabinet.

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Weidel’s economic views have been consistently free-market and neoliberal. Under her leadership, the AfD has proposed cutting taxes, reducing bureaucracy, and reviving Germany’s dormant nuclear energy sector. Weidel’s declared role model is former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. In 2017 Weidel told the British newspaper The Independent, “Thatcher took over Great Britain when the country was economically in the dumps and built it up again.”

As a former economist and investment banker—and a lesbian who is raising two boys with her partner, a Sri Lankan woman—Weidel has often been described as an unlikely figure to lead a party that champions traditional values and tight border controls. However, some believe these personal traits have worked in Weidel’s favor, claiming that her cosmopolitan background—along with her elegant style and her calm demeanor—have broadened her appeal outside the party and helped make it more palatable to moderates. Journalists at prominent German newsmagazine Der Spiegel noted in 2017 that at first blush, Weidel’s involvement with the party was hard to explain. Her “entire career and lifestyle is in direct contradiction to her right-wing populist party’s doctrines,” they wrote, before concluding that she was driven more by personal ambition than by ideological convictions.

In Germany’s 2025 elections Weidel became the first member of AfD to run for chancellor. She did not win, but her party took 20 percent of the vote, doubling its share from 2021. Weidel owns a home in her voting district in southern Germany, but she and her family mostly live in Switzerland, which she says is safer for her. Her opponents have often criticized the arrangement.

Since at least 2024 Weidel has been embraced by prominent figures on the American and European right. U.S. Vice Pres. JD Vance met with Weidel in February 2025, during his first official tour of Europe—an encounter she has called “one of the greatest moments for us.” Elon Musk has become a major backer of the AfD. Weidel has also been endorsed by European far-right leaders, such as former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the leader of Austria’s Freedom Party, Herbert Kickl.