Once relegated to the extremist fringes, far-right ideologies are no longer whispered in shadows—they are shouted from podiums, their champions rebranded in polished suits and technocratic precision. Enter Alice Weidel, a former Goldman Sachs banker turned leader of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). She is a lesbian, a mother, and a paradox—a queer figurehead for a party that advocates “remigration” and a rigid, heteronormative definition of family. How did such a figure emerge at the helm of a party notorious for its unabashed nationalism and xenophobia? More importantly, what does her ascent reveal about the banalisation—and normalisation—of fascism in the West, even within queer spaces?
Illustration by GAY45. (Left to right: Alice Weidel, Elon Musk, Hannah Arendt).In 1961, The New Yorker sent Hannah Arendt – already one of America’s foremost political thinkers and by then a dying (in our current moment, a more or less extinct) breed of public intellectual – to Jerusalem. Her mission: report on the trial of Austrian SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, the high-school dropout who became one of the Holocaust’s most wet-mouthed architects, who had orchestrated meticulously the mass deportations of millions of Jews, queer folk, and other “degenerates” to his Europe-wide hellmouth of extermination camps and ghettos.
The series of columns she published on the trials were later compiled into Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, one of the twentieth century’s most divisive pieces of political philosophy. Her thesis, that Eichmann was not an evil man but more so an obedient one, a faithful dog acquiescing to his master’s orders, has both been lauded and loathed, a slag heap of accusations suggesting Arendt, a German-born Jew, had minimised the insidiousness of the SS Svengali. Yet, her pithy aphorism to name the phenomenon of normal men guilty of atrocious acts has remained umbilically tied to the popular conscience in a way that little political-philosophical jargon does and endures today: the banality of evil.
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A decade after Arendt’s Report, another man, albeit one more much marginal to European History, was placed on trial in Hamburg, a city bullishly developing a reputation as an offbeat hippy mecca as those 1970s settled. This man was Hans Weidel, a former barrister become former judge in the Nazi’s kangaroo military courts which gleefully played the game of the Fates over the regime’s course, arbitrarily executing some 20,000 civilians.
In this role, Weidel was praised by superiors for his diligence, for ‘carrying out his work with great interest and understanding.’ Three years into the job, he was appointed the branch’s Chief Staff Judge by way of Herr Hitler’s personal hand, receiving a stamped letter signed personally ‘Der Führer’. When, later on, Weidel was questioned about his evidently zealous involvement in humankind’s darkest hour, he pleaded a hickish idiocy, that he knew nothing of the Nazi Party’s genocidal disposition since he lived in but a quaint provincial town and so ‘didn’t hear anything there other than what was in the newspapers or on the radio.’
Despite numerous attempts at prosecution for his Nazi collaborations, Weidel would never be charged. Nor were any of his former Wehrmacht court colleagues, despite the arm’s description as a ‘crucial factor in the most horrendous crime perpetrated by any nation in modern history’ by historians. Weidel was thus allowed to live a normal life until he died an obscure man in 1985, as often goes the banality of evil.
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Also in 1985, Weidel’s estranged granddaughter, Alice, had just turned six on a frostbitten February morning. It has become a well-established part of this prodigal granddaughter’s self-mythology that her father, Hans Weidel’s son, fled his “provincial” Upper Silesian hometown in February 1945 as the Soviets invaded, settling in a sleepy and unremarkable Westphalian market town named Verl and founding an agency that traded in furniture, antiques, and other bric-a-brac. It was there, most likely, that a tottering blonde Alice celebrated.
From this sleepy, unremarkable slate, the Weidel daughter rose: she graduated top of her class in business and economics at the University of Bayreuth; wrote a well-received doctoral thesis on China’s pension system under the euro-sceptic economist Peter Oberender (euro as in the currency more so than the geographical region); and performed a vocational tour de force through some of the world’s most prestigious financial names, Goldman Sachs followed by Bank of China followed by Allianz, as if collecting cards.
Then, in 2013, as her bookish scepticism toward the euro churned on her conscience, put only worse at ease by the throes of the Eurozone crisis, she joined a marginal upstart party known as the Alternative for Germany, the AfD. She was committed to the cause but remained rather coy as a fledgling member. ‘In your view,’ reads a 2015 email she sent to AfD co-founder and then-leader Bernd Lucke, ‘what are my chances of becoming a member of the national committee?’. But, as was becoming something of a leitmotif in her life, Weidel still rose.
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In 2015, the ascendant AfD was in the midst of an insidious identity crisis. Having originally been founded by Lucke, a former economics professor at the University of Hamburg; a Saxonian businesswoman named Frauke Petry; and Konrad Adams, a regarded journalist, on a platform whose most theatrical call was for the abolition of the euro, this inchoate AfD – the AfD that had first attracted co-cognoscenti Alice Weidel – was winning moderate, if slightly granular, success, sending seven MEPs to the European Parliament in May 2014 and snagging a modest constellation of seats (more a Little Dipper than a Perseus or Orion the Hunter) in Germany’s state legislatures.
However, the country’s political ecosystem was to soon go into Anthropocene. As the so-called “Arab Winter” worsened over and away in the Middle East and North Africa, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made the decision to thrust her country’s doors open, a Herculean feat of humanitarianism and hospitality that has remained one of the most consequential in Europe’s recent, often amnesiac memory. ‘Wir shaffen das’ (“we can manage this”) she fiercely rallied, welcoming over 1.2 million refugees into the country, some 40% of those absorbed by the EU during the 2015-16 crisis. “Keep Calm and Keep Control” ideologues in Britain and other European countries retorted, opposed to the new porosity of Europe’s borders; sure, only Brexit happened as it turns out, but calls for Frexit (for France), Dexit (for Denmark), Italexit (for Italy) and others echoed, if a bit unmelodically, back as well.
The refugee crisis’s demographic spasm induced new nationalist mythopoetics on Islamisation and the Great Replacement across both the fringe and mainstream political imaginary, the two increasingly in harmony. Petry – who had from early on established herself as the face of the AfD’s national conservative faction, who once advocated the use of firearms on arrivant refugees among other swivel-eyed positions – seized this cultural momentum and launched a putsch inside the party, turning the AfD from one of periphrastic technocrats into a frothing populist machine. When the AfD was first founded, its vision of an “Alternative for Germany” had been a Germany that used the deutschemark instead of the euro; under Petry, this Alternative turned ethnonationalist: a Germany without migrants, Islam, or, as Petry insisted, a single minaret on the evening skyline.
Frau Weidel, who had earlier pledged her loyalty to Lucke and his moderates, had played her own hand in the faction’s downfall. When the AfD met for a crucial vote on the party’s soul at its July 2015 leadership elections she switched allegiances, making her Faustian bargain with Petry’s camp. She chameleonically metabolised Petry’s political lexicon, steadily started scapegoating burkas and Sharia courts as the cause of Germany’s socioeconomic rot rather than the abstract fiscal evils of the euro and other abstract macroeconomic ideas. Alice Weidel the globalist technocrat was dead. Alice Weidel the ‘ideologically nimble’ firebrand was born.
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Except, not entirely. For better or for worse, it took Weidel a little while to forge her own, personally curated brand of far-right fanaticism in the party. When, in April 2017, Frau Petry was ousted from party leadership following a drop in the party’s share of the national vote – partly a response to the increasingly outrageous positions of a party establishing itself as Germany’s loudly-buzzing anti-immigrant gadfly – and Weidel was elected as a co-chair, the Wall Street Journal described the ‘lesser-known’ Alice Weidel as a ‘pro-business figure,’ a safe, uncontroversial, and unideological pair of hands.
Weidel, though, seemed keen to shed this image. The following month, she described the burqa as a form of apartheid. When party colleague Björn Höcke was accused of having Nationalist Socialist sympathies, including by AfD colleagues, Weidel dismissed it all as a media-manipulated misunderstanding. And when it came to light that she was in a relationship with a Sri Lankan-born Swiss woman and that the two were raising a family together, Weidel denounced the idea that this might single her out in a party which had sought to legislate a definition of the family as between a man and a woman. According to Reuters, she insisted that she was in the AFD ‘not despite her homosexuality but because of it,’ praising its unique willingness to address that Muslim migrants held toward queer folk. The AfD went so far as to put this on a poster, erecting a billboard of a gay couple affirming, ‘My partner and I don’t want to get to meet Muslim migrants who believe that our love is a deadly sin.’ A homonationalism par excellence.
This strategy worked, both for Weidel and her party. When the national elections rolled around that September, the AfD climbed to a 13.4 per cent finish, making it ‘the first openly chauvinistic, illiberal party to capture seats in Germany’s foremost democratic institution since the early postwar years.’ Sensing the electoral goldmine the party had stumbled onto, the AfD dug its heels in on this populist, ethnonationalist messaging. Even if, come 2021, they had tripped slightly to a 10.3 per cent finish in that year’s elections, this was rebalanced by record finishes in local votes in Hesse and Thuringia, bulwark regions of the working classes. Come 2024, it would be Thuringia where the AfD managed to snatch a plurality in the state elections, becoming the first far-right German party to do so since the Nazi Party’s rise. The news swiftly convulsed Europe into an anxious frenzy. And now, as snap elections for the Bundestag loom, and with Weidel safely installed as the party’s one leader, an Elon Musk-backed AfD are projected to become the second largest party in Germany, a worrying new phase in Europe’s populist backslide at the continent’s heart.
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But what of Alice Weidel? In many ways, she is a paradox inside her party, the queer, female technocrat partner of an immigrant woman, leading an openly populist, predominantly male, anti-queer, and nativist party. Yet, such identitarian oddities are increasingly naturalised in Europe’s populist landscape. Earlier last year, GAY45 reported on a disquieting poll suggesting 26 per cent of gay Austrian voters were planning on voting for the far-right Freedom Party, an SS-founded ally of the AfD that pundits are expecting to soon become the country’s largest party. In France, a smaller, but not insignificant, 17 per cent of queer voters supported Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, including 38.6 per cent of the country’s married gay men. And in Serbia, the openly lesbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabić has everywhere prostrated herself for the country’s far right while making no tangible attempts at improving LGBTQ+ rights in the Balkan nation. So much for queer community!
However, if Weidel’s identity and image make her a paradox in the cursory sense, the rhetoric she has chosen to mobilise as she has climbed the party ladder make her a fitting Führerin. She has, among other controversies, warned of a “generational displacement” in Germany, a barely-concealed dogwhistle for invented narratives of white genocide; promised rollbacks on trans rights while condemning “gender idiocy” in universities; and refused to attend a 2023 celebration of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany at the Russian embassy because ‘celebrating the defeat of one’s own country… is something I have personally decided… not to take part in.’ All of this while actively defending party members accused of displaying Nazi leanings and denouncing her compatriot’s “cult of shame” around the Holocaust years, as if there is something to be vindicated by therein.
So, once upon a time Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil to describe men like Weidel’s grandfather, who submitted to populist, ideological superstructures and, through such submission, committed unimaginable atrocities. But what of women like Weidel, who are attempting to resurrect such superstructures – endorsing “remigration”, condemning sexual and religious minorities, forgiving the Nazi years – while attempting to sell it all off as normal politics, peddling far-right discourse like a suited-up saleswoman, dressed all pretty in her technocrat’s clothing. We are today, it grows clear, living in the age of the banalisation of evil: “banality” not as a static descriptive for certain wrong-doing men or women, but as an insidious process through which morally-corrupt, persecutory ideologies are being pushed further and further into the Overton window and increasingly being absorbed by a voting public who don’t mind a redivision of society into a virtuous us against a villainous, scourge-like them.
This is where the paradox of Weidel’s appearance and ideology are resolved. If fascism has historically taken hold in the popular imaginary through the charismatic leadership of magnetic figures like Mussolini, Hitler, or even President Trump, Weidel – with her patina of liberal normalcy, her well-ironed suits and Sri Lankan-Swiss girlfriend – makes fascism seem not like the exceptional politics of an exceptional populist front, but the political of normal, banal people. If she can vote far right, this suggests, then anybody can, maybe I can too.
And it’s not just Weidel who has done this. Marine Le Pen has successfully revised history and whitewashed her party so much so that, in the space of a decade, she has gone from a political and media pariah to a mainstream French name. So much so that when her Nazi-apologist father Jean-Marie passed earlier this year, the centrist French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou chose to remember him as a ‘fighter’ and ‘figure of French political life’, if only a controversial one. Giorgia Meloni has similarly gone from a wearisome fascist sympathiser in her own Italy to the most powerful woman in Europe, the nucleus of contemporary EU politics. And even Donald Trump has successfully transmogrified, turning from America’s outsider anti-underdog in 2016 to the first Republican to win the popular vote in over two decades. A politics once commonly held as an objective evil in much of Western thought has now wormed its way, parasitically, into a normal, accepted, and technocratic part of the process. Here we see the banalisation of evil.
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