The AfD's Alice Weidel has compared the wearing of a hijab to apartheid. "The headscarf doesn't belong in Germany," the right-wing candidate for chancellor said in an interview.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Kappeler
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One of Germany's most prominent nationalists said on Saturday that she would like to see not only the burqa but all headscarves banned in German public spaces.
Alice Weidel, who along with Alexander Gauland is representing the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party ahead of federal elections in September, called the religious garb sexist and inappropriate in German society.
"Headscarves do not belong in public spaces and should be banned on the streets," she told Berlin daily Tagesspiegel. Adding that it was an "absolutely sexist symbol," she compared the separation it makes between men and women to the apartheid system of racial segregation in South Africa.
In excerpts published ahead of Sunday's edition of Tagesspiegel, the former Goldman Sachs employee said that "the headscarf doesn't belong in Germany," echoing her party's official platform that "Islam doesn't belong in Germany."
She then suggested that on top of a headscarf ban, there should be a fine for anyone wearing a full-face veil or burqa.
While attacking the hijab, which is widely worn in Germany's Muslim communities, represented a new extreme - full-face veils in public have already been forbidden in Bavaria, Germany's conservative southeastern state, and for government employees carrying out official business.
Weidel did not apparently extend her suggestion to several other religions, including Orthodox Judaism, which require believers to don different kinds of head coverings.
European countries move to ban niqab, burqa
Different forms of Muslim religious garb have long been a point of contention throughout Europe as the continent comes to grips with new waves of immigration. In 2011, France became the first country to ban the full-face covering, or niqab, from being worn in public, citing security concerns. The Netherlands adopted a similar measure in 2015, and Austria followed suit this year.
On Friday, the deputy chairwoman of Britain's populist right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP) turned heads when she suggested the UK ban full-face veils on the grounds that they "prevent intake of essential vitamin D from sunlight."
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
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.
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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."
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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."
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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.
