Co-leader of the anti-immigration AfD Alice Weidel paid an asylum-seeker under the table, the German newspaper Die Zeit claimed. It's been a difficult week for Weidel, who was viewed as her party’s liberal face.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Kappeler
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The weekly newspaper said it had learned that Weidel had initially paid a female Islamic Studies student to clean her home. When the student left, Die Zeit said, the job was passed on to an asylum-seeker.
Both women were paid 25 Swiss francs (€22, $26) per hour in cash, said the report, and neither had a contract of employment and no invoices were provided.
Questioned by the newspaper about the legality of such an arrangement, Weidel's lawyer initially said the one-day deadline for a response set by the paper was "too short for the elaboration of relatively complex legal issues."
Weidel's lawyer later told Die Zeit that she had a "friendly contact" with a Syrian who was also a guest in her house. "But that the asylum-seeker was employed in our client's house or had worked as an employee or received a salary is incorrect."
The claim is likely to lead to allegations of hypocrisy, with Weidel having called for tougher asylum laws and accusing the German navy of participating in human trafficking by helping migrant boats in distress.
A fresh new image?
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now polling at between 8 percent and 11 percent and looks set to surpass the 5 percent threshold to gain parliamentary representation after Germany's September 24 general election.
Weidel - who lives in a lesbian relationship with a Swiss partner who was adopted from Sri Lanka as a child - was installed as co-leader of the party in April alongside tweed-jacketed 76-year-old former civil servant Alexander Gauland. The 38-year-old media-savvy business consultant, who spends much of her time in China, was seen as a choice that might represent the AfD in a more outward-looking and liberal light.
Leading members of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have often made provocative, if not outright offensive, remarks — targeting refugees or evoking Nazi terminology.
Image: Britta Pedersen/dpa/picture alliance
Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia first made headlines in 2017 for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. In July 2023, he echoed Nazi rhetoric by declaring that "This EU must die so that the true Europe may live." In 2019, a court ruled that it was not slanderous to describe Höcke as a fascist.
Image: picture-alliance/Arifoto Ug/Candy Welz
Alice Weidel
One of the best-known public faces of the AfD, party co-chair Alice Weidel rarely shies away from causing a row. Her belligerent rhetoric caused particular controversy in a Bundestag speech in 2018, when she declared, "burqas, headscarf girls, publicly-supported knife men, and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth, and the social state."
Image: Sebastian Kahnert/dpa/picture-alliance
Maximilian Krah
Maximilian Krah, the AfD's top candidate in the 2024 European Parliament election, has called the EU a "vassal" of the US and wants to replace it with a "confederacy of fatherlands." He also wants to end support for Ukraine, and has warned on Twitter that immigration will lead to an "Umvolkung" of the German people — a Nazi-era term similar to the far-right's "great replacement" conspiracy theory.
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Alexander Gauland
Former parliamentary party leader Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. He said Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
Christian Lüth
Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. "The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD," Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. "We can always shoot them later, that's not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn't matter to me."
Image: Soeren Stache/dpa/picture-alliance
Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts — but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said in 2016. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers," she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Murat
Harald Weyel
Not all of the AfD's scandals are about racism: Sometimes they are just revealing. Bundestag member Harald Weyel was caught in a scandal in September 2022 when a microphone he clearly didn't know was on caught him expressing his hope that Germany would suffer a "dramatic winter" of high energy prices or else "things will just go on as ever."
Image: Christoph Hardt /Future Image/imago images
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, former head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
The email contained references more commonly used by extreme right-wing members of the party, with claims that Chancellor Angela Merkel's government was seeking to flood Germany with "Arabs, Sinti and Roma" and that Germany needed to maintain its "genetic unity." It also referred to the government "pigs" who were "marionettes of the victors of World War II."
However, Weidel's lawyer has insisted that the email was nothing more than a fabrication.
