Alice Weidel reportedly received €130,000 in campaign donations from Switzerland ahead of 2017 elections. The AfD co-leader's political rivals are now gunning for her resignation.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Weigel
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The co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party received dubious donations for her campaign in the runup to German general elections in September last year, German media has reported.
Alice Weidel's district office near Lake Constance received a total of €130,000 ($150,000) in several tranches of mainly 9,000 Swiss franc amounts ($8,900, €7,900) between July and September 2017, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and broadcasters NDR and WDR said, citing bank statements. The donations were made by a Swiss pharmaceutical company.
Weidel, who was the party's lead candidate in the elections, said that she first learned of the "unsolicited" donations in September last year and decided to return the money after having doubts about its legality.
On Monday, she clarified that "the account the donation went to was the official account of the Lake Constance district office" and that the money "did not go to me directly." She ruled out what she called "personal consequences," hinting that she will not resign over the affair.
But the repayment did not take place until April 2018, according to the report, and the amount returned was some €6,000 less than the amount originally received.
'Illegal' donations
Germany allows political parties to receive funds from non-EU countries only if they come from German citizens.
The donation was "unquestionably an illegal party donation because it came from outside the EU," campaign financing expert Martin Morlok said.
Moreover, according to the German law, a party must immediately inform the Bundestag — the lower house of the German parliament — if it receives more than €50,000 from a single donor. The unidentified donor appears to have transferred the funds in smaller tranches to circumvent this rule.
AfD leading candidate Alice Weidel talks to DW
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The Bundestag has not yet responded to the report.
The AfD, which has been repeatedly accused of bending campaign financing rules, faces a hefty financial penalty if the donation is deemed illegal. Anyone who accepts an illegal donation must transfer three times the amount to the Bundestag president, Morlok said.
Calls for resignation
The report sparked strong reactions from Germany's center-left parties. Green party politician Britta Hasselmann said the donation appeared to be dubious and demanded that all facts be put on the table.
Johannes Kahrs from the Social Democrats (SPD) told German business newspaper Handelsblatt that the Bundestag should closely examine the entire affair.
"If the donation was illegal, Weidel must resign," he said.
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.
Image: Ronny Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images
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.
