Free Republic

As an openly gay politician who lives with her Sri Lanka-born partner in Switzerland, Alice Weidel was an unusual choice to many to lead Germany’s far-right AfD into Sunday’s elections, where it scored its best-ever result. To her legions of political foes, Weidel serves as a “fig leaf” for a party that has railed against asylum seekers, Islam and multiculturalism and some of whose top figures have voiced revisionist views on Germany’s Nazi past. On Sunday the 46-year-old, who says Margaret Thatcher is her political idol, led the Moscow-friendly AfD to a record result of around 20 percent. She told...

U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance has called for Germany’s establishment parties to reconsider their policy of shutting out the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, Vance said, “I think, unfortunately, the will of voters has been ignored by a lot of our European friends.”“It’s really about censorship and about migration, about this fear that President Trump and I have, that European leaders are kind of terrified of their own people,” the Vice President explained to the press ahead of his address to the conference.“It’s really about censorship and about migration, about this fear that...

Alice Weidel, the parliamentary group leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, is being formally investigated for violating campaign finance laws, the public prosecutor’s office in the southern city of Konstanz announced Tuesday. The AfD branch in Lake Constance is accused of receiving large sums of money from a Swiss company in the leadup to Germany’s 2017 general election. The vote saw the AfD become the largest opposition party in the Bundestag. The donations from abroad, paid in 18 tranches, reportedly amounted to more than €132,000 ($150,000). The prosecutor said the probe would target Weidel and three other...

A spate of bloody knife attacks in recent weeks has led to concerns about a rise in knife crime. The fact that teenage refugees have often been the culprits has also fired up right-wing critics of the government. On Tuesday morning, a 24-year-old woman’s life still hung in the balance after she was stabbed on Saturday in the town of Burgwedel in Lower Saxony. After undergoing an emergency operation she was placed in an artificial coma. The woman and her boyfriend had reportedly become involved in an argument with a group of three teenagers from Syria. When the situation turned...