The leader of Alternative für Deutschland has been called ‘Adolfina’, praised Donald Trump and criticised Germany’s Muslim international footballer Mezut Özil. Is the country’s most talked-about politician a serious contender for office?
Frauke Petry is, unusually for her, a little flustered. The 41-year-old politician has turned up for a television interview very late, wearing a checked shirt, a no-go for the camera, she quickly realises. Swiftly changing into a cream jacket borrowed from the TV presenter, she pleads for the camera not to show her scuffed boots. “It was all a bit of a dash this morning,” she admits afterwards. Two of her four children are at home sick – “on the sofa, headache, stomach ache” – and she didn’t want to leave them until she knew they would be OK on their own.
But this, she insists, is how she wants it to remain, with family as her number one priority, despite her swift rise up the political ladder since becoming leader of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).dramatic gains in March's regional elections, it is now the most threatening challenger to Angela Merkel’s coalition government, and she is the most talked-about female German politician after the chancellor.
“It’s not a problem as such, being a woman in politics – in fact, it’s easy to move up precisely because you’re in a minority,” she says. “The problem has to do with actually managing to still see your children and to look after them.”
Time management, she says, has become even more crucial since she recently separated from her husband, a Lutheran pastor, and formed a romantic attachment with the AfD’s representative in the European parliament, Marcus Pretzell, himself a father of four, who has advocated forming closer ties with France’s Front National. “Before last summer I left family almost completely to my husband, but since the autumn we have separate times with the children. So I’m forced to organise my appointments so I can have breakfast with them, take them to school, read the goodnight story, all that normal stuff.”
It’s hard to reconcile this woman – affable, intelligent, quoting philosophy and making references to classical music – with the cold, hardboiled image she has projected since she became the party’s de facto leader last year.
AfD has a strong profile in the former communist east of Germany but a growing following in western parts as well. She calls the party “liberal-conservative”, rejecting labels such as rightwing populist, far right, anti-immigrant…
“The idea of the party is embodied in its name, ‘Alternatives’,” she says, a response to Merkel’s repeated insistence that her policy on the euro was “alternativlos” (“without alternative”). “Basically we are a very necessary corrective in German and European politics.”
She predicts that, like the far-right Freedom party (FPÖ) in neighbouring Austria, the AfD will benefit from “a breakdown of the big parties”.
No comments:
Post a Comment