Alice Weidel: This is how she goes on the counteroffensive at RTL

The top candidate once again told what she usually tells in this election campaign. Only her AfD, says Alice Weidel, wants to consistently reduce taxes in a government, for companies but also for citizens.

The solidarity surcharge should even be abolished completely. Instead, there is a family split in which the children are also taken into account for tax purposes.

But then the advertising speech stops. Pinar Atalay interviews the first candidate for chancellor ever nominated by the AfD for RTL this Monday evening. And the presenter is well prepared.

Atalay asks how much exactly an average family of four will be relieved of. Annual income 40,000 euros gross, single earner, two children?

Alice Weidel – black turtleneck sweater, gray jacket, light gray pocket square – first tries her preferred interview tactic. She avoids.

“As an economist, I usually spend too long with the numbers,” she says, before of course not mentioning a number. “But I want to talk to you about the principle,” i.e. more net from gross and less inflation…

But what about the concrete relief, asks Atalay. A report assumes that the low-income family she describes would get even less money than before – namely 440 euros a year.

Now Weidel abruptly switches gears. She ends her evasive maneuver and takes refuge in the counteroffensive. “The numbers are wrong!” she says. “You have to see that the institutes are politically controlled.” The ZEW, for example, is “very SPD-oriented”.

And that brings us right into the latest special edition of “RTL Direkt”. The station to which the star belongs to, gives all the top candidates of the Bundestag parties the chance to present their program during the election campaign.

Last week, SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the Green Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck and the CDU chairman Friedrich Merz were guests. This week the leaders of the FDP, Left, BSW and AfD are coming, i.e. Christian Lindner, Jan van Aken and Sahra Wagenknecht – and Alice Weidel.

If you ignore the critical questions in the RTL studio, things are currently going pretty well for the AfD chairwoman. Since her election as candidate for chancellor a week ago at the party conference in Riesa, she has also officially been number 1 in the AfD. In the polls, the party is stable at 20 percent. That is, at least for now, second place behind the Union.

What is happening outside Germany also inspires the AfD. National, authoritarian radical populism is booming worldwide. While Weidel is giving her interview, Donald Trump is being inaugurated for the second time in Washington DC.

Of course, the AfD leader is also asked by Atalay about the US President. What does she expect from him? “Donald Trump didn’t start a war during his last term in office,” replies Weidel. “That’s all right.” Trump also prioritized peace in Ukraine in his election campaign. In this respect, the AfD has “naturally new and great hopes” for him.

The US President, says the moderator, has also announced that he will protect the borders to Mexico with soldiers and expel millions of immigrants. Would that also be something the AfD would do?

Weidel evades again and goes into a longer explanation: “We say very clearly that law and order must be implemented again in Germany …” Atalay asks twice in a row: with soldiers? “How the federal police do it is up to them,” replies the candidate.

The fact that the AfD candidate for chancellor expressed herself so cautiously may have something to do with the scandal that Frauke Petry caused in 2016. Similar to Weidel, the then AfD chairwoman had called for strict border controls, including security systems and rejections. She said that border police officers would have to “use firearms if necessary.” Maximum outrage followed, and Petry had to put things into perspective.

The current party leader avoids this escalation. And so, at least at this point, the observation of an increasingly extreme AfD cannot be determined.

But the quotes that are recorded in a short film during the interview sound different. It is a hit list of Weidel’s most notorious sayings, from the “headscarf girls” and “alive knife men” from her 2018 Bundestag speech to the We-will-tear-down-all-wind-power-plants slogan in her party conference speech in Riesa.

After Weidel has listened to all this, the graphic from a representative forsa survey is displayed in the studio. According to the figures, 79 percent of Germans consider the AfD to be a right-wing radical party.

The result of the survey seems plausible, as it corresponds to the proportion of Germans who do not vote for the AfD. And that proportion is still the vast majority. But the AfD candidate for chancellor would of course like to see things differently.

“This is a framing that works against us,” she says. “People don’t buy it anymore anyway.” The AfD is a “conservative-liberal party” that stands for freedom: “My goal is that we are a free society, that we are rich and secure again.”

That sounds similar to Donald Trump’s inauguration speech. Atalay wants to know from Weidel that the US President is actually a role model for the AfD with his personnel selection. If super-rich people like Elon Musk got involved in the USA, could Theo Müller von Müllermilch, who calls the AfD leader a friend, also play a role in an AfD-led government?

Of course he could, replies Weidel. It would be good for the political establishment if “significantly more people with economic policy expertise” contributed their experiences. “Accordingly, I can very, very well imagine having an Elon Musk in the government, or a Peter Thiel – or of course someone like Theo Müller.”

Incidentally, Peter Thiel is the German-born billionaire who, like Musk, thinks monopolies are great and agitates even more strongly against free competition. How this attitude is compatible with the principle of the market economy that Weidel so highly values ​​– this could perhaps be discussed another time over a glass of Müllermilch.

Transparency note: The star is part of Germany.