Weidel doesn’t obviously fit the bill of a right-wing radical. But her journey from conservative economist to far-right leader resembles the path of the party itself as it grew more extreme — and, as Sunday’s result showed, a large swath of the German electorate has done the same.
From Goldman Sachs to far right
Weidel’s earlier career in international finance isn’t typically part of the resume of a nationalist party leader.
Born in the western German city of Gütersloh, she studied economics in the town of Bayreuth and then worked as a financial analyst for Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt, and later for Credit Suisse and insurer Allianz in Germany, China, Singapore and Hong Kong. The man who advised her on her doctoral dissertation was the economist Peter Oberender, who believes in strict free markets and helped found a party that was a precursor to the AfD.
Weidel joined the AfD in 2013 shortly after its inception and was a natural fit. At the time it was a single-issue party founded by a group of economics professors who, in the midst of Europe’s debt crisis, opposed the euro and financial help for debt-ridden countries. In the 2013 federal election the AfD won 4.7 percent of the vote, just under the 5-percent threshold for winning parliamentary seats.
The AfD began to shift to an anti-immigrant party during the unprecedented influx of refugees from Syria and other parts of the Middle East in 2015. Radical-right figures flocked to the party, seeing in it a vehicle to launch a far-right movement, and pushing out many of the founders .
In early 2017, by which time Weidel was on the board of the AfD, the extreme-right Höcke gave a speech urging Germans to forget the Nazi past or, as he put it, do a “180-degree turnaround in policy of remembrance,” while also criticizing the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. “We Germans, our people, are the only people in the world who have planted a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,” he said.
