Meet Alice Weidel, the ex-Goldman Sachs banker who could lead a far-right party to its best German election result since the Nazis

She has a PhD in economics, worked for Goldman Sachs and Allianz Global Investors, and lived in China for six years. She even speaks conversational Chinese.

Axel Schmidt/Reuters

After leaving the world of banking, she worked as a freelance consultant for startups, according German newspaper Der Speigel.

Her views were not always extreme, her old friends say.According to the Financial Times, one of Weidel’s old friends emailed her former investment banking colleague a speech Weidel made as AfD leader, asking: “What happened to Alice?”

“If she had such radical views while she was at the bank, she certainly kept them quiet,” the unnamed ex-colleague told the FT.

She says she was first attracted to the AfD because of its opposition to the euro.

(The campaign photo above reads: “The euro is ruining Europe!”)

Weidel frequently discussed her “adamant opposition” to the euro and presented “very sophisticated arguments for why it wasn’t good for Germany,” the former colleague told the FT.

But while Weidel is against the euro, she doesn’t mind staying in the European Union — she just wants economically weaker states, like Greece, to leave, Timo Lochocki, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund think tank, told Vox.

She has called Angela Merkel “insane” for her immigration policy, and accused the German chancellor of “running a headless government that has no idea what it is doing.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who Weidel called “insane.”Thomson Reuters

The incumbent German chancellor vowed in late 2015 to “do what is necessary” to allow as many asylum seekers into the country as possible.

But three months later, she revised her offer and vowed to “drastically decrease” the number of refugees entering the country after over 890,000 people sought asylum that year alone.

The number of refugee entries has also decreased dramatically since then, according to interior ministry statistics, as cited by Reuters.

Regardless, Weidel told The Local this May: “The country will be destroyed through this immigration policy. Donald Trump said that Merkel is insane and I absolutely agree with that. It is a completely nonsensical form of politics that is being followed here.”

Then-US presidential candidate Trump told CBS in 2015: “I always thought Merkel was like this great leader. What she’s done in Germany is insane. It is insane.”

Weidel said refugees fleeing their countries were contributing to a “brain drain” in the Middle East.

Syrian refugees attend an election rally for Angela Merkel in Torgau.Reinhard Krause/Reuters

Weidel told The Local that instead of opening its borders to Syrian refugees fleeing the war, Germany should have paid the United Nations Refugee Agency and Syria’s neighbours, such as Jordan, who could help keep refugees in the region.

“They [the German government] could also invest in special economic zones in the region so that people aren’t ripped out of their social contexts, which leads to a huge ‘brain drain’ there,” Weidel told the news site.

But she also labelled immigrants “illiterate” and without “any training” in the same interview.

Axel Schmidt/Reuters

“Eventually they’ll have to go back, this [immigration] just can’t go on,” she added.

She claims her party isn’t racist, by the way.

A vandalised AfD poster in Berlin, which reads: “Burkas? We stand on bikinis.”Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

“There are no racists in the AfD,” Weidel insisted to The Local.

“But at the same time one must see that dangerous people have come into the country through the government’s open-border policy.”

Weidel, who is openly gay and in a registered partnership with a woman, says Germany’s children shouldn’t be taught about homosexuality until after puberty.

She also insisted that her party was not homophobic after it mourned the “death” of the German family after same-sex marriage was legalised.

People celebrate in front of Germany’s lower house of parliament after MPs legalised same-sex marriage.REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

After Germany’s parliament legalised same-sex marriage in June this year, AfD’s website front page featured a death notice that read, according to a Politico translation: “In deep sorrow, we say goodbye to the German family, whose constitutional protection was buried by the ‘representatives of the people’ at the German parliament.”

The AfD’s manifesto says a family can consist only of a father, mother, and children. Days after the parliament decision, the party vowed to challenge the bill before the country’s highest constitutional court, Bild reported.

“To be in favour of the traditional family does not mean you reject other lifestyles,” she told the Financial Times. “The fact that I was elected top candidate [of the party] shows how tolerant it is.”

After the same-sex marriage vote, Weidel also tweeted (above), according to a Vox translation: “[Holding] the ‘marriage for all’ debate while millions of Muslims illegally immigrate to Germany is a joke!”

Weidel has insisted, however, that the party is not homophobic.

“First impressions are often wrong,” Weider also told Philosophia Perennis, a German political blog, on Wednesday. “[But] on closer inspection, the AfD is the only real protection for gays and lesbians in Germany.”

She has also vehemently denied her party has contributed to far-right violence.

Joachim Herrmann/Reuters

Weidel has attempted to distance her party from far-right violence, and denied that the amount of right-wing violence had risen in the country.

“Has violence from the right risen? What is your evidence for that?” she asked The Local.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Verfassungsschutz, recorded 1,600 crimes linked to far-right ideology in 2016, according to Deutsche Welle. This marked an increase from 1,408 far-right-linked crimes in 2015.

“We condemn right-wing violence very loudly and repeatedly,” she added. “This doesn’t fit into our public image and that’s why it doesn’t get attention.”

Earlier this year, she sued a TV show for calling her a “Nazi bitch.”

Thomas Lohnes/Getty

She sued German broadcaster NDR.

According to Reuters, the broadcaster’s “Extra 3” satire programme aired a part of Weidel’s speech to an AfD party congress, in which she said: “Political correctness belongs to the dustbin of history.”

Following the clip, NDR’s presenter said: “That’s right! Let’s put an end to political correctness. The Nazi bitch is right. Was this incorrect enough? I hope so!”

Weidel requested an injunction against the re-airing of the programme, but was told by the Hamburg District Court that satire was protected under the right to freedom of expression and that, as a public figure, she would have to “put up with exaggerated criticism.”

But for now, it’s unlikely she will become the next German chancellor.

AfD leaders Alice Weidel and Alexander Gauland.Axel Schmidt/Reuters

According to seven accredited German pollsters, AfD is on course to win about 10% of the national vote, which could place the party in tied third place, behind Merkel’s CDU/CSU and Martin Schulz’s Social Democratic Party.

In other words, while Weidel is nowhere near winning the chancellorship, her party is likely going to sit in parliament.

With businessinsider