Far-Right AfD Rises in Germany, Boosted by Trump Backing

The tweet from Elon Musk arrived a few days before Christmas, and it felt like a gift from heaven to Germany’s far-right political party, Alternative for Germany (AfD). It consisted of six words: “Only the AfD can save Germany.” The party’s leader, Alice Weidel, assumed it must be a hoax. Refreshing her feed, she stared at the message and checked its source: @elonmusk. Then she called an aide to make sure he could see it too. After that, Weidel recalls, “I actually almost fell from my chair.”

The AfD, founded in 2013 on a promise to slash spending, close Germany’s borders, and forsake the European Union, had never earned such a powerful endorsement. It had always been on the fringe, with about a tenth of the seats in Parliament and no role in the federal government. Ahead of elections on Feb. 23, polls show it has the support of about a fifth of voters. The rest would sooner expect the AfD to embarrass Germany than to save it.

The country’s main intelligence service has labelled some branches of the AfD as extremist groups and placed several of its leaders under surveillance. In the European Parliament, an alliance of right-wing groups expelled the party last spring for being too radical. One AfD official had suggested the Nazi SS were “not all criminals.” Another has called the Holocaust a mere speck of “bird sh-t” on the glorious sweep of German history.

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None of this has stopped the Trump Administration from embracing the AfD. In mid-February, Vice President J.D. Vance met with Weidel during his first official tour of Europe. The cornerstone of his trip was an appearance at the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of leaders from around the world. As an establishment outcast, the AfD was not invited, and Weidel was not allowed in the venue. So her meeting with Vance took place in the basement of the Westin Grand, where he spent the night.

Vance’s message, Weidel says, amounted to a “wake-up call” for the German establishment: the U.S. would no longer allow Europe to keep the far right out of its politics. Vance delivered that message to the diplomats gathered in Munich the same day. “Shutting people out of the political process protects nothing,” he said from the stage. “In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.”

For Europe’s leading political parties, the speech was startling. Some called it a blatant act of interference in the German elections, which were then about a week away. The AfD was projected to take second place, its best result ever, and this time it would enter Parliament with a clear nod of support from the Trump Administration.

Weidel still finds it hard to fathom, let alone explain. “It’s unbelievable,” she says a few days after the Vance meeting, sitting in her narrow, book-strewn office with its bank of windows overlooking the Reichstag. “One of the greatest moments for us.” When asked about the reasons for the Administration’s support, she lowers her voice as though preparing to offer a psychic reading. For Trump, she says, “there might be something personal behind it.” His grandfather, Frederick Trump, immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1800s from Germany. Those blood ties, Weidel says, may have prompted the U.S. President to look across the ocean and wonder, “What’s going on with the continent of our grandparents?”

An easier way to explain the Administration’s fondness for the German far right would be the vein of resentment they both tap. Much like Trump and many of his global imitators, the AfD promises a return to national greatness with no guilt and no apologies. It laughs at the wagging fingers of liberal elites and seeks to strip them of power, much as the MAGA movement has in the U.S.

Trump has other reasons for undermining the German establishment, which he scorns for decades of low military spending within NATO and high levels of immigration from the Muslim world. Musk harps on a different complaint with Germany’s leaders—their alienation of the AfD. In a striking feat of doublespeak, he frames the issue in the language of freedom and democracy, as though the nation that perpetrated the Holocaust violated its own values by building what Germans call a political “firewall” around the far right.

Read More: Column: Elon Musk Is Boosting Germany’s Far Right. It Will Backfire

Weidel says she heard the same message from Vance in the basement of the Westin: “We need to break down the firewall,” she says. “Open up the corridor for freedom of speech!”

A few days after their meeting in Munich, this corridor indeed began to open up for Weidel. She became the first AfD candidate for Chancellor ever invited to a TV debate on Germany’s public broadcaster. On stage with her three male rivals, she looked defensive and aggrieved, seething when they tried to gang up on her.

The leading candidate, Friedrich Merz, a conservative who has adopted many of the AfD’s hard-line positions on immigration, used his closing statement of the debate to promise his voters that he would never allow the AfD into his government. Under him, he said, the firewall would hold.

Weidel was indignant. “He just copies our program,” she says two days later in her office. “But he can’t implement it, because he needs to govern in coalition with leftist parties … And they do not let him do anything.” On such topics, her tone carries a kind of righteous mockery, at once light and condescending, as though she is tossing out snark at the haters on social media. But other subjects, especially those related to German history or her party’s ties to the radical right, reveal a tense and guarded quality in Weidel. She often reverts to a repertoire of practiced lines to defuse or preempt any suggestion of bigotry in the AfD.

This has long been her role within the party, and it helps explain her rise. Worldly and style-conscious, with a doctorate in economics and a ­résumé that includes a stint at Goldman Sachs, Weidel, 45, looks nothing like the gruff, tattooed stereotype of the right-wing goon. Thanks partly to her polished image, the AfD has been able to claim a veneer of modernity despite its retrograde stances on gender, immigration, national identity, and just about everything else. The official platform of the AfD defines a family as a “father, mother and children.” ­Weidel’s does not fit that mold. Her partner is a woman, the Sri Lankan-born filmmaker Sarah Bossard, with whom she has two sons, both of whom go to school in Switzerland, where the family has a home.

Weidel does not like to talk about that. She prefers to reminisce about her childhood in the small town of Harsewinkel, in western Germany, where many of her core beliefs were forged. As a teenager, Weidel recalls, she was afraid to go to the public swimming pool, because groups of immigrant boys would harass blond German girls like her. “Even in my little village, we had a problem already with Muslim migration, and it was quite painful for us,” Weidel says, asking TIME not to print the insults she says were hurled at her. “I came to the conclusion that a proper, peaceful life with a high proportion of Muslims is not working out.”

That conclusion underpins her party’s platform. On immigration, AfD calls for closing Germany’s borders to asylum seekers and for the mass expulsion of immigrants, especially those from the Muslim world. Describing its plan for a “comprehensive repatriation offensive,” the platform avoids using the German word Deportation, which is uncomfortably resonant of the transfer of Jews to Nazi death camps during World War II.

In the language and culture of Germany, such mementos of the Holocaust have created awkward stumbling blocks along the AfD’s path to power. Like millions of Germans, Weidel feels the moral weight of what her relatives did during the war. Her family’s links to the Nazis are closer than most. Her paternal grandfather, Hans Weidel, was a member of the SS and served as a military judge in German-occupied Poland, an appointment granted by order of Adolf Hitler himself. The job required him to send enemies of the Nazi regime to concentration camps, where millions of people—most of them Jews, but also communists and other political prisoners—were murdered during the Holocaust.

Near the end of the war, as the Allies pushed the Nazis back toward Berlin, Weidel’s father, then around 6, had to flee his home region of Upper Silesia with his mother and siblings. Most of that region became a part of Poland after the war, and Gerhard Weidel, now 86, never went back to his childhood home. But the experience of losing it haunted him throughout life.

“He was completely traumatized,” his daughter says. After the family escaped Upper Silesia, she says they got stuck in the town of Kassel during an Allied bombing raid, and they took shelter in a bunker. When they emerged, the entire city was burning, an image that followed Weidel’s father into adulthood. “He would sometimes have these nightmares,” she recalls. “I had to wake him up, because he was screaming.”

The family rarely discussed these events. “It was something he wanted to exclude emotionally,” Weidel says. But around Christmastime, after a couple of beers, her father would sometimes recall the awful months of hunger during the winter of 1948, and the waterlogged basement room where he and his family lived as refugees.

Weidel’s elder son Paul, who is 12, recently began to ask about the war, and his mother has trouble finding the right ways to tell him about it. “We go back to history,” she says. “But I start very early in German history,” reaching far beyond the wartime years to make sure her son realizes how much more there is to his country’s past.

Melanie Amann, a German journalist who wrote a seminal book about the AfD, says a surprising number of the party’s leaders share the experience of wartime dispossession. They are known in German as Vertriebene (the ­displaced) and some of them have long complained that their suffering is treated as a forbidden subject, along with most appeals to German victimhood during the war.

“They live with this intergenerational trauma,” says Amann. “And for a long time they were not supposed to talk about it.” But in the politics of the AfD, Amann sees an underlying sense of grievance over the way Germans were treated after losing World War II. “It’s a kind of revenge,” Amann says. “They want to break free of all these taboos they see around them.”

Many of those taboos have been written into German law, which criminalizes the use of Nazi slogans and symbols. The publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf is banned, as are various forms of hate speech, which the German authorities tend to police with greater vigilance than their European peers—and certainly their American ones. The desire to suppress any resurgence of the far right gave rise to the Brandmauer, or firewall, that excludes the extremist fringe from Germany’s governing coalitions.

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The biggest target of this ostracism has been the AfD. Even as its public support has grown over the past decade from less than 5% to around 20% in the polls, the party has remained a pariah in Parliament. When Weidel first took a seat in that chamber in 2017, she says her fellow lawmakers refused to ride in an elevator with her, let alone sit down to talk about legislation. “That’s what the firewall means,” she says while walking through the halls of Parliament on a recent afternoon, passing stone-faced guards and politicians in the corridors. At first it upset her. “They would not even say hello to me.” But then she remembers finding a response: “Look,” she would say, “You can insult me. You can throw all the bad things at my head. But it doesn’t hurt me. It hurts my voters.”

Last spring, she got a chance to complain about this to Musk. Left-wing activists rallied to protest the expansion of Musk’s automotive plant in the suburbs of Berlin, setting fire to an electricity cable and disrupting the power supply to the Tesla Gigafactory. Weidel reached out to Musk’s team and offered her support. He did not respond to her ­directly, she says. But by the end of the year, the firewall in German politics had become one of Musk’s obsessions.

His support for the AfD has since mirrored the tactics Musk used to help Trump get re-elected. German law prohibits foreign campaign contributions, and Weidel says Musk has never given any money to the AfD. But the endorsement he posted on X, his social media platform, was only the start of his influence campaign. A few days later, he published a full-throated defense of the AfD in a German newspaper, calling the party the “last spark of hope” for the country’s future. In early January, Musk conducted a lengthy interview with Weidel on X. “If you are unhappy with the situation, you must vote for change,” Musk said, “and that is why I’m really strongly recommending that people vote for AfD.”

Two weeks later, Musk appeared via video link at the AfD party convention. The focus of his speech was historical memory and the taboos that it created after WW II. “It’s good to be proud of German culture and German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that ­dilutes everything,” Musk told the party ­faithful, adding that there had been “too much of a focus on past guilt.”

Read More: It’s Tempting to Want to Forget the Past—But Dangerous. My Own Family’s History With the Nazi Party Is No Exception

Projected on a giant screen at the rally, Musk’s face showed genuine sympathy, even kinship, with the weight of inherited guilt that many Germans feel. He was born and grew up in apartheid South Africa, whose racist policies found support among Musk’s family. His maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, expressed sympathy for Hitler and fiercely defended the apartheid regime, which he saw as the vanguard of white Christian civilization.

“We need to move beyond that,” Musk said to cheers from the crowd at the AfD rally. “Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their grandparents, their great-grandparents.”

The response to Musk’s speech was muted in Germany. Some politicians called it election interference. Yet Musk was entitled to his opinions as a private citizen. Trump had not yet given him a formal role in the White House, and many in Berlin hoped the speech would not reflect the official position of the incoming Administration. That hope died when Vance appeared in Munich and pushed Musk’s criticism a few steps further.

What most alarmed the Europeans was the link Vance made between “free speech” in Europe and the ­American commitment to Europe’s defense.

“If you are running in fear of your own voters,” he said, “There is nothing America can do for you.” The message seemed clear to the German politicians in the audience. As one of them put it: “We won’t defend you unless you accept fascists in your coalition.”

Kaja Kallas, the E.U.’s top diplomat, called an emergency meeting of foreign ministers in response. “It’s somewhat confusing,” she tells TIME of Vance’s speech. To Kallas, it resembled the election meddling that Russia has deployed across Europe, funneling support to fringe parties, including the AfD, that align with Moscow’s interests. “At least the Americans are very public about this,” Kallas says. “The Russians say, Well, it wasn’t us.”

Vance’s speech spurred the Europeans to unite in their indignation. “They really found the pressure point,” says Benedikt Franke, the CEO of the Munich Security Conference. “It freaks us out and makes us act.” The maneuver might have seemed clever, Franke added, “even Machiavellian,” were it not for the strangeness of choosing the AfD as the preferred American partner. The AfD calls for Germany to resume its reliance on Russian oil and gas, which Trump has long opposed. “This party is not aligned with American interests,” Franke says. “If they actually read the AfD platform, they would see that it’s all, like, ‘Go, China, go!’”

Weidel, who studied Chinese, held regular meetings with the former Chinese ambassador to Berlin. Early in her career, she lived in Beijing and worked for the state-owned Bank of China. Around then, in the early 2010s, Weidel says, she had her political awakening in response to the actions of Angela Merkel, who was then the German Chancellor. A staunch defender of NATO and the E.U., Merkel said in 2009 that there is “no reasonable alternative” to Germany’s support for the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Merkel used similar language­—“no alternative­”—to defend other bedrock principles, including the decision to welcome war refugees from Afghanistan and Syria.

The Alternative for Germany formed in 2013 as a rebuke to such policies, and Weidel joined that year. She clashed with the party’s extremists as she sought to broaden its appeal. Perhaps the most notorious AfD leader, Björn Höcke, has been repeatedly charged with violating German hate-speech laws. Weidel led an effort in 2017 to have him expelled from the party. But they have since made amends, appearing at rallies this year and embracing on stage.

In these elections, the AfD looks set to double the number of seats it holds in Parliament. It has little chance of joining a coalition government, says Sergey Lagodinsky, a German Member of the European Parliament. “But the bigger they get, the harder it is to block them,” he says. “At some point it does become a question of democracy.”

For Weidel, the collapse of the firewall feels like a matter of time. She has already made the debate stage and won the support of millions of voters. Now the White House appears to be on her side. As a symbol of her gratitude, she keeps a red baseball cap displayed in her office, inscribed with the words Make Germany Great Again. She tried it on with a smile during our interview. The Trump Administration, she says, “feel that something is severely going wrong in Germany.” With their help, Weidel intends to set it right.