Do we like Alice Weidel?
Our score: 1 out of 10. She has embraced "remigration" in her own words and led a party that is winning on it, with little real good on the record to set against that.
Weidel grew up in Harsewinkel in north-west Germany, the youngest of three, then went into finance with stints at Goldman Sachs and Allianz Global Investors. She speaks Chinese and joined the AfD soon after it was founded in 2013, back when it was mostly about opposing the euro. She now co-leads it with Tino Chrupalla, and in February 2025 it took just over 20% and came second.
The nearest she has come to a courtroom as a suspect was a Swiss money trail. Prosecutors in Constance looked at her and three other AfD officials over roughly €130,000 that a Swiss pharmaceutical firm reportedly paid to a local branch in 2017 and that was repaid in 2018. They closed the case in 2021 for insufficient evidence, and her spokesperson said she was never accused of any culpable action.
Now the harm check, and it's the big one. At the AfD's Riesa conference in January 2025 she said “Wenn es dann Remigration heißen soll, dann heißt es eben Remigration”, and delegates cheered and put the word into the election programme. The party's definition covers deporting people obliged to leave, but the federal agency for civic education calls the word a polite cover for mass expulsions of people with a migration background.
On LGBTQ+ issues she's a walking contradiction. She lives openly as a lesbian, yet she opposed opening marriage to same-sex couples in 2017 and opposed the 2023 self-determination law on legal gender changes. She has also criticised "trans-pop culture". In July 2026 she said same-sex relationships should be treated as equal, which is the warmest thing on file, but it sits beside a party that still defines family as father, mother and children.
Her relationship with history and facts is shaky. In her January 2025 chat with Elon Musk she called Hitler a communist, and the head of Munich's Institute for Contemporary History called that “historisch grundfalsch” (historically wrong). On the Holocaust, she told ARD she may have said "Schuldkult" (guilt cult) years ago, while calling political use of the Holocaust disturbing. Back in 2022, EUFactCheck rated her claim that a vaccine mandate failed only because of the AfD as mostly false.
The recent run is the main event. After Saxony-Anhalt, Weidel's party is the biggest force in the state but three seats short of a majority, and the state's intelligence service labels its branch confirmed right-wing extremist, which the party rejects. A Cologne court ruled in February 2026 that the national agency can't use that label for the whole party for now, while finding efforts within the AfD to undermine the free democratic order. Weidel called it a major victory.