AfD’s Alice Weidel: Europe Is Becoming Like The Soviet Union
ALICE ELISABETH WEIDEL: We’re facing a situation throughout entire Europe with the European Union, a Soviet Union type bureaucratic system, disturbing free markets throughout Europe, disturbing democratic processes. They’re so harmful to our constitution. If the media are not neutral anymore and are protecting an agenda, we have a problem here because the entire information and transparency process is highly disturbed. I would like to thank Elon Musk for buying X to give people the chance to inform themselves differently than from mainstream media because in Germany the mainstream media they’re all paid by our government. We have all the public broadcasting stations against us. I think it is time that people see the truth and masks are falling off. All the castles of lies, they fall apart. The more they fall apart, the stronger they fight. I’ve grown up in western Germany and I’ve never thought that this would ever happen in my Country, that they impose measurements like in the eastern part of Germany: there was a surveillance and Soviet Union style. It’s unbelievable for me as a free citizen. That’s the reason as soon as Chancellor Merkel said: “Well, there are no alternatives to my politics” I was like “oh, wait a minute. That sounds strange.” This is completely politicized. Can I say that word?
MARIO NAWFAL: Politicized me? Yeah, yeah.
WEIDEL: This completely politicized me when she said that. There’s no alternatives. That’s also why our party has this name, Alternative for Germany.
MARIO NAWFAL: When I started to really dig into all the efforts that have been leveraged against you, there’s just so many of them. I looked at other examples of things happening across multiple Countries around the world, including the EU, but you’re up there compared to other European Countries. Comparing to Austria, Austria, they haven’t even gone close to as much. I did a whole table comparing what they’ve done. What they’ve done for you, actually, I want to focus on that. What you’re actually going through in a Democracy. What’s ironic is that you’re labeled as extremist by the intelligence service that’s meant to be protecting you. You’re labeled as an extremist. Then some of your party members are debanked. We’ve had party members. Was there any barred from running recently? I know there’s one a while ago.
ALICE WEIDEL: No, no, no, no.
NAWFAL: On the local level, it hasn’t been that way. And now we’re worried that they’ll actually go and ban the entire party. I didn’t know you’re going to… Sorry, I put that on to ask you that question in a more subtle way. You’ve already said it. You’ve said it publicly: “They’re looking at banning me and that’s a concern we have”. For me, that’s a far-fetched concern. But it’s a serious risk. It is a serious risk. Yes. Can you maybe break down and give us some stories, experiences of what the AfD is going through? We can later talk on why, but that’s not as… Everyone knows that this is a strategy used against anyone. I wouldn’t say it’s anything political. It’s more against the Establishment. That’s what I sensed. But more, what are their strategies? Just break it down for us. What has the AfD gone through and what are you going through right now?* – *THIS INTERVIEW DATES BACK 3 JUNE 2025 ED NOTES –
ALICE WEIDEL: Let me start right from the beginning. We are a very young Party. We were founded in 2013. And we’ve been through everything. It started with the media labelling us as right-wing and extremists right from the beginning. By labeling the AfD like this, the alternative for Germany. The goal was of establishment politicians and media to exclude us from society, making us into pariahs within our Country. People started to lose their jobs. Spouses of party members lost their jobs, for instance. I can tell you from my personal experience. I’ve been through with my family, destroying my family, destroying the business of my partner. I cannot do business besides my political endeavor. I was in banking. I did consultancies* – she worked even for Goldman Sachs source wikipedia ed notes -. I did M&A advisory. But as soon as I would publish my clients, they would actually destroy the clients. Therefore, de facto, I cannot work. This started making us into pariahs and trying to make us into untouchables in society. This is how the entire thing started. Then, institutionally, when we rose. We came from 4%, 5%, 10%. And then in the last three years, we’ve doubled. In the federal elections on the 23rd of February, we reached 21% almost. And we are right now at a pulse of 25%, 26% (2025, now they’re much higher ed notes). Even overtaking the chancellor’s party, the CDU, or being equal in the eastern part of Germany, we are actually double as strong as the CDU. We are reaching levels of over 40% already. So this is the stronger we got. They started to put institutional measures on us. I mentioned before, in our panel, I mentioned our intelligence service. Right from the beginning, we got the media, we got establishment politics, and then our intelligence service, which is in a George Orwell 1984 sense, being labeled as an institution for protection of our constitution.
NAWFAL: Exactly. Germany’s Federal Office For The Protection Of The Constitution.
WEIDEL: Yeah, wonderful, isn’t it?
NAWFAL: Reminds me of USAID, which is USAID, nothing to do with branding.
ALICE WEIDEL: Yes, it’s branding. It’s great. It’s like in 1984, it’s a ministry of truth. You talked about censorship and the ministry of truth, they labeled the words differently. So our ministry of truth, our intelligence service, they started to label us in 2018 as extremists on probation. And then they put us to the next level. They labelled us as extremists on suspicion. Suspicion. Yes, suspicion was the next level. Probation. Yeah, suspicion. And now, certified.
NAWFAL: And they send you a medal and a trophy.
ALICE WEIDEL: Yes, the medal and trophy of extremists. And basically in Germany, you’re labeled as an extremist if you, let me put it very simple, if you go to work, if you raise a family, if you pay taxes, if you want to have proper education for your children without gender studies or something, if you want to have security on your streets, if you want to have secure borders, if you don’t want to have illegal immigration, if you want to have low energy prices, if you want to buy a combustion engine car, if you want to go back to nuclear power plants, Germany is the only Country in the industrial world destroying its infrastructure.
NAWFAL: Didn’t you shut down your nuclear plant after the… Yes, of course.
WEIDEL: Yeah, six.
MARIO NAWFAL: Explosion? Yes, yeah. The Nord Stream explosion. Yes, six of them. Yes. Yeah, six of them were closed and one of them, after the explosion, was like, there’s an energy crisis incoming and then you closed down the last nuclear plant. Yes, of course. I couldn’t understand.
WEIDEL: Yeah, yeah. Six after the explosion? Yes, exactly. So the last six were switched off. And also the gas pipelines, the gas infrastructure, they ripped it out. So we have a damage of billions or actually not billions, but trillions, right? So the damage of ripping out and destroying our infrastructure because it’s not only that they switch off the power plants. They switched off the nuclear power plant after the explosion. They destroyed them by explosion, right? So they destroyed the towers so that you cannot, that you’re not able to put these power plants back. You have to imagine that. So this is a huge deployment of our infrastructure. And then they continued with coal, the coal plants, right? Germany had the most modern nuclear power plants, coal plants, and they put explosives in it and just destroyed them, right? No, it’s really serious. This ideology, the greenish ideology, started by our chancellor, Angela Merkel, like a CDU Chancellor. I think she was our first green chancellor we’ve ever had. And yeah, she said like, look, there was this Japanese power plant that got run over by a huge tide and this tide came up with the German Rhine. So therefore we need to destroy all the nuclear power plants. And this is what they’ve done. So we are the only industrial Country with no proper energy supply. But let me come back to my example. So if you’re a taxpayer, if you raise a family, and if you go all through this very normal formulation of having a normal and proper life, you are labeled as an extremist, right? So I’m coming to that point that the Alternative for Germany, our party, is a normal, conservative, freedom-loving party. And we are labelled like this, just like having normal positions, giving people, and especially the younger generation, a perspective on their lives, right? In freedom, in wealth. And yeah, we are facing a situation, not only in Germany, but throughout entire Europe, where we have with the European Union: a Soviet Union-type bureaucratic system, disturbing free markets throughout Europe, disturbing democratic processes. Look at, you actually named the examples of Romania. Look at this example. It’s so terrible. You have an elected President, right? And they say, no, you have to repeat this election. I mean, hello, what’s going on? And then they imprisoned that guy. And oh, they found, what, 10 million euros in the basement with a ticket?
NAWFAL: Of a security guard.
WEIDEL: Yes, yes. And then an airplane ticket to Putin. Yes, of course. I mean, like, what are you telling the people? And it goes throughout the Nation States of Europe. So therefore, J.D. Vance, he was so right in his magnificent speech on the Munich Security Conference, when he said, like, look, the danger to our democracies are not coming from outside, but coming from inside. And there is no room for firewalls, right? So you cannot exclude democratic votes, right? You cannot exclude the people. They need to have the power of voice. And if you disturb, like the bureaucrats in Europe, and also the bureaucrats in Germany, if they disturb by taxpayers’ money, by the institutions, German institutions, if it disturbs this process, you have a problem in the democratic formulation, right?
MARIO NAWFAL: There’s just so much. When they labelled you a certified extremist organization, what I try is always try to see things from both sides. Like, for example, nuclear power plants, a lot of people worried about them, the way they destroyed them. I didn’t know that’s how they did it. It doesn’t make sense. But you can have a debate about it. Immigration can have a debate about it. And different people have different stances. But there’s some things where I can’t see the other side. So when I saw the label of certified extremist organization, I still cannot believe that term is even being used in this discussion. I’m like, all right, what has Alice or another leader of AfD said or done? They’d be like, all right, well, okay, maybe that’s questionable. And I went through, and I went through, and I went through. I went through even some extreme statements and stuff that were said a while ago, or a joke in bad taste. There is literally nothing there that any logical person, you know, in law, you use the, I can’t remember the term, but just a normal average person, how would they perceive this? That would come to a conclusion, I have to look at what AfD stands for, all the different policies, the controversial, non-controversial, that would label you as such. And that’s me, who spent a lot of time trying to understand this.
ALICE WEIDEL: Yeah, I see that.
MARIO NAWFAL: Look at this. That’s just for today’s short. I try to go deep to try to understand both sides. It still goes on, by the way. And I couldn’t find anything. So my question is, the German people will see through this. And they have one of the smartest societies in the world. Do you think that this strategy will work, or will it backfire spectacularly? And how will it backfire if so?
ALICE WEIDEL: Interesting question. I think the major role in the transition is with the media, right? So Alexis de Tocqueville, he labelled media as a fourth power of Democracy. Why? Because media, they have a task. And the major task is to give transparency and good information. To make people well informed about their decision. And if the media are not neutral anymore, and are basically protecting an agenda that is green, woke, socialist, protecting green, woke, socialist governments, we have a problem here. Because the entire information and transparency process is highly disturbed. So therefore people cannot form a well-informed opinion. And this is where the major danger comes from. Especially the elderly. They look at all the public broadcasting TV stuff. I don’t have a TV anymore. So I haven’t had a TV for 25 years. Because I don’t watch TV anymore. Because I don’t feel well informed. I’d rather read books or I’m on social media. And while mentioning this, I would like to thank Elon Musk for buying X to give people, at least the younger ones who use social media, a chance to inform themselves differently than from mainstream media. Because in Germany, the mainstream media, like the public media, they’re all paid by our Government. So therefore the mainstream media, they broadcast the opinion of the bodies and institutions they get the money from. This is a very simple incentive system. And we have all the public broadcasting stations against us. I’ve been through all this chitchat and framing process for almost 12 years now. Where I’m labelled in really terrible, obnoxious ways. But this is their strategy of making people who have a different agenda and a different opinion to party us. And this is a strategy you could also see in the US or in Argentina with Donald Trump. It was unbelievable what they did to this man. And I really felt physical pain. What they did to his family. How they framed him. Like with all these house searches. And then finally trying to assassinate him. It was unbelievable. It was really heartbreaking. And we are so happy. I am personally so happy that he got American President. Because this is also a chance for all of us, for all patriotic and freedom-loving people, to form a new coalition to have the masks fallen, right? Falling off. I think it is time in the year 2025. It’s very crucial that people see the truth. And masks are falling off. And I strongly believe in that. You see it everywhere. Where all the castles of lies, betrayals, corruptions, they fall apart. And the more they fall apart, the stronger they fight. And therefore we need to go through this battle of destruction. They want to destroy us, right? And by labeling us like this, we are, and me personally, I’m endangered, right? It’s something they want people to go to or have very bad ideas how they could harm us.
MARIO NAWFAL: Especially what you saw with, you know, when they label someone. We saw that with Trump labeled as a Nazi, Nazi, Nazi. You have people just kind of brainwashed with the ideology. And then eventually extreme case scenario is, you know, you have people around you to make sure that doesn’t happen to you. Yeah.
ALICE WEIDEL: Look at a rifle or a knife or something.
NAWFAL: That’s the danger of it.
ALICE WEIDEL: It is. It is. It’s a huge danger. It is a danger for us and our families. It’s quite something.
NAWFAL: I feel like we’re at a fork where there’s an optimistic and a pessimistic path. An optimistic one is that what happens in Germany is similar to what happens in the U.S. Because people are, you know, I would use the word waking up, where I see them through the façade based on the numbers and how your numbers have been rising very quickly. But Romania is an example of how, despite that, it might still not be enough. I mentioned Pakistan earlier because I’ve done a lot of coverage there with Imran Khan. It was another level. Pakistan is much worse, which is meant to be Democracy, much worse than what happened in Romania. But let’s use Romania as an EU Country. It’s that people saw through it. Most people. X is not as popular there. So censorship is always easier to censor there. But they did cancel the election. And the ally of Kalin Drogescu, George Simin, did not win in the telegram efforts to censor the conservative voices. Do you worry that despite people seeing through this, the system is just so entrenched in society that you might not be able to break through? Is that something that sometimes keeps you up at night? Do you have those worries?
ALICE WEIDEL: Of course I do. I’ve been having these worries through years. I’ve been thinking, like in the military, I’ve been thinking of worse cases. Because if you prepare for worse cases, you’re well prepared for everything. Do you mind if I ask what’s like a worse case? The worst case is banning our party and then also imprisoning people. Executive boards imprisoning me. In general. Yes, yes, exactly. And just like inventing a case, right? So I read Milei’s biography. Milei was so fearful, anxious, sorry, anxious in his campaign, that someone put cash in his car so that the Police come in and say, like, oh, look, oh, we found this cash. Look, we need to imprison you. Romania. Yeah, Romania is the same thing with 10 million and the ticket to Putin. It’s unbelievable. I think, yeah, Romania is a very bitter case. And they will try in Germany. They will try everything. But in comparison to Romania, Germany is the biggest Country in Europe.
MARIO NAWFAL: Better, not as corrupt, better Democracy. So I’m more hopeful.
ALICE WEIDEL: Yes, and we are so strong already with over 10 million voters in Germany. Strongest in Eastern Germany. If you do this, if you really try to ban our Party, I think it’s not going to work well. You cannot exclude millions of people and just get rid of the representation. What they do right now, because we just had Federal Elections, what they did is we are comprising right now in the German Parliament, in the German Bundestag, we comprise almost 25 percent. Our parliamentarian group of over 150 people. Parliamentarians, they exclude us from the entire representation. You may read about it, right? So therefore, I mean, they’re so harmful to our Constitution. Our Constitution says, look, we have minority rights, right? And the people voted for the AfD, for the Alternative for Germany. And you just exclude 25 percent out of any Parliamentarian representation. I mean, what is this? And I think, I really think that you cannot continue this path of undermining democratic processes. I firmly, I strongly believe in it, that you cannot go on with these disturbances. Because right now, like Chancellor Merz, right? He’s such a weak Chancellor, so weak. He got the worst, worst result in the elections. And then he was forced, he was forced to go in a coalition with a socialist. And they just have a slight, a very slight majority. So he cannot move his feet. And therefore, he concentrates on, like, imagine this, like a German Chancellor. So I cannot believe it. Still, I cannot believe it. But I would like to talk about it for me as a German. Because I, so I truly think that we have a responsibility, like we have a historical responsibility: that a German Chancellor is really, really on his way on sending tanks against Russia, sending missiles, sending billions of money to Ukraine. While arbitraging the peace talks and ceasefire talks of a US President, Donald Trump. I mean, like, how crazy is this? While Donald Trump, he, he puts every endeavor to end this, this terrible dying in the Ukraine, because the Ukraine people, they’re fed up of this war as well. So it’s just like a small group of Elite and Administration of a none, like, like, of a, of a President who’s very reluctant, who doesn’t want to have elections, right? And the people don’t want it anymore. The Russians don’t want to have it anymore. I’m really think, and also polls, they prove it in Germany. The German people, we don’t want the financial support and we don’t want to have German weapons in the Ukraine. I mean, like, how crazy is that? That he, he, he pushes against Russia while undermining President Trump’s endeavor to end this terrible dying. It’s crazy. From my point of view, it’s crazy. And we need to do everything to bring Peace to Europe, to bring peace to the Ukraine. And I think Germany is completely on the wrong path.
MARIO NAWFAL: Yeah. Well, Alice, it’s going to be a very stressful few months and years for you. So all the best on a personal level and I really appreciate your time. It’s a pleasure to see you. Hopefully I’ll see you in Germany soon. I hope Germany will not get to a stage, I’ve got like a list of Countries, I’m just, Romania is one of them, too worried to go there considering how far they’ve gone to censor, et cetera. Germany was not even considered there. It’s still not there, not even close in my opinion. But I hope that doesn’t change and I hope, you know, they kind of take a similar path to the US.
ALICE WEIDEL: How about, how about you come visit me in Berlin? So I show you around and then we have a very…
MARIO NAWFAL: I’ve spent months in Berlin and Hamburg. I know, I love Germany.
ALICE: Yes, yes.
NAWFAL: But I’d be more than happy to.
ALICE WEIDEL: Please come visit me and then we can have a longer interview. I really enjoyed it to be here with you and I wish you all the best with your work and yeah, it was a pleasure meeting you.
MARIO NAWFAL: Pleasure.
ALICE WEIDEL: Thank you so much. Thank you.