Alice Weidel opened the Bundestag debate on Wednesday morning in a tone as mild as her cream blazer.
For eight years, the co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has used the Bundestag as a launch pad for countless social media-friendly zingers. In her party, she is far from alone: in the last parliamentary period, AfD politicians accounted for 11 per cent of seats and two-thirds of the calls to order.
Germany is in a new political reality with chancellor Friedrich Merz and his ruling centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The 46-year-old Weidel, a consultant-turned-politician, has sensed her parliamentary party should change with the times.
Last weekend, the AfD’s Bundestag MPs backed a new “moderate” approach in parliament. When Weidel spoke on Wednesday, her 27-minute parliamentary address contained familiar accusatory vocabulary – “impudent”, “cheek” – but without the familiar hail of verbal outrage.
Instead, Weidel’s tone was more disappointed regret, a schoolteacher chastising the new German leader for the country’s decline and fall: a three-year recession with rising company insolvencies, sinking industrial jobs and – contrary to Merz election promises – a new €500 billion debt pile.
“People want a state that spends and intervenes less, with less bureaucracy, taxes and deductions, one that focuses on its core tasks of security, rule of law, public order, infrastructure, education and working institutions,” said Weidel. “There’s enough money for all this. But instead you need this monstrous mountain of debt because you don’t have the courage to apply the red pen to migration costs and climate nonsense.”
Gaining volume – and forgetting the AfD’s new vow of moderation – Weidel turned to Merz on her right. She called him a “liar-chancellor” over claims that, as Merz ran an election campaign last February promising to defend Germany’s debt rules, he used the time between campaign appearances to study documents on how to loosen those same rules to allow multibillion investment in infrastructure and defence.
The AfD’s political origin story for the new coalition is “election fraud”. Merz only won over the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) for his coalition, it argues, through a drastic U-turn that betrayed CDU voters and the party tradition of fiscal responsibility.
The CDU could have an alternative coalition with fewer compromises, Weidel added with a smile, if it dismantled its “firewall” that blocks co-operation with the AfD.
“Come out of your dead end,” she said. “The further you run in the wrong direction, the more difficult will be the inevitable reversal.”
Squeezing this pressure point in the Bundestag debate produced instant results on Wednesday. Unlike his predecessors, Merz opened his first major speech as chancellor by addressing directly the AfD using its political framing.
The populist party started life attacking EU bailouts, then surged to popularity a decade ago with a populist, anti-migration line. It was shifting again, Merz argued, because his government’s tough new line on irregular arrivals and lower asylum applications meant the AfD was “losing the battleground to which you owe your existence”.
Just two months in office, Merz’s own long-term political existence – and that of his coalition – is uncertain, hinging on reforms that are either in the works or on a long to-do list.
In the Bundestag, the CDU leader insisted his party’s philosophy – peace and freedom in Europe with an “open, liberal and tolerant Germany” at its heart – made it fundamentally incompatible with the AfD.
“We will not allow ourselves depart this path,” he said, with a nod to Weidel, “by people who spread bad mood and embrace resentment.”
In his Bundestag office, AfD backbencher Ronald Gläser thinks provocation is no longer needed to attract attention as “everyone recognises the AfD now”.
“It’s not us who radicalised, though, but the circumstances in the fatherland,” he said. “People don’t recognise their country any more.”
In February’s election, the AfD finished in second place with nearly 21 per cent support. Of its 10 million voters, one in 10 previously backed the CDU. Up two points in polls on its record result in February, Gläser sees potential for further inroads into Germany’s mainstream voter base.
“We want to win over voters furious with the CDU but who might have been turned off by our more radical image,” he said. “This new approach is not about different content but a different tone.”
Sometimes tone and content go hand in hand. A weekend AfD policy paper made no mention of “remigration” – an ambiguous term that, depending on who you ask in the party, means everything from removing criminal foreign nationals to deporting non-ethnic Germans.
“The AfD have disrupted the symmetry in the German party system and there is a longing in the party for executive power,” said Gero Neugebauer, a political analyst in Berlin. “But to make further progress it would have to change its way of doing things completely.”
In the AfD, however, old habits die hard. In Wednesday’s Bundestag debate, an AfD backbencher was called to order for using the word “bullshit”. And, three hours after her mild start, Weidel was warned to stop heckling speakers or leave the chamber.
