The 46-year-old is raising two sons with a Sri Lankan-born woman, a filmmaker, and speaks fluent English and Mandarin, having done a doctorate in economics in China. A western German leading a party that is strongest in the former communist East, she worked for Goldman Sachs and Allianz Global Investors and as a freelance business consultant before entering politics.
Typically sporting a dark suit, white shirt and pearls, she comes across as more poised and competent on various topics than some of her colleagues, they say. Her critics call her a ruthless opportunist and a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”.
“Weidel is someone who can appeal to a broader public than the typical AfD constituency, to the middle class bourgeoisie,“ said Oliver Lembcke, political scientist at the University of Bochum. “She seems like the adult in the room among all these lunatics and extremists.”
She has also harnessed widespread anger over a series of violent incidents throughout the election campaign, which have led to the arrests of immigrants.
This is the first time the AfD has nominated a chancellor candidate and Weidel has already acknowledged it is unlikely to enter government for now, given other parties refuse to work with it.
Only with the AfD can the conservatives implement true change, says Weidel, who sees the firewall crumbling by the next election.
POLITICAL UPBRINGING
The youngest of three, she recalls getting into trouble at school for being too argumentative as well as having uncomfortable encounters with Middle Eastern immigrants living in social housing in her West German town.
After studying business and economics she joined Goldman Sachs, grew bored and moved to China to do a doctorate on the Chinese pension system while working as a business consultant.
Her position in the party cost Weidel friends, prompting the family to move, she told Weltwoche.
A climate change sceptic, she wants to lower taxes, end the minimum wage, slim down the state and end the costly shift to a carbon-neutral economy.
“Burqas, girls in headscarves, knife-wielding men on government benefits and other good-for-nothing people are not going to ensure our prosperity,“ Weidel told parliament in 2018.
Weidel’s strength lies in her versatility, said Hans Vorlaender, a political scientist at Dresden University of Technology. She acts as a “moderating, well-mannered bourgeois politician” for established media, but then knows exactly how to reach her more extremist clientele elsewhere, in particular on social media.
But she mostly does not focus on the issue of her identity - refusing to be called queer - and is adept at dealing with different wings of the party in order to maintain her position of power, tolerating rather than reining in the more extremist factions, said Lembcke.
That same year Weidel said she was in the AfD “not despite her homosexuality but because of it” as it was the only party to address the issue of Muslim immigrants’ hostility towards LGBT+ people, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper.
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