AfD boss lauds Thatcher 

Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), has named the 1980s UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher as her political “role model”, impressed by how she supposedly rebuilt a country facing economic ruin.
Weidel said she favoured free child care and nurseries because that would help families, and apparently boost the party’s feeble female support.
The UK was “economically in the dumps” when she came to power in 1979, Weidel said, praising her for “swimming against the current, even if it becomes unpleasant”.
She said the AfD aimed to be ready to join a coalition government by 2021, although all other parliamentary parties have ruled out working with the populist right wingers.
The AfD won 13 per cent of the vote and 93 seats in the Bundestag last month as it capitalised on anti-immigration sentiment and the idea that Germany needs rebuilding.
Weidel, a lesbian, said her filmmaker partner and two adopted sons would move to Berlin from Switzerland when her current filming project was completed.
Weidel urged former AfD leader Frauke Petry to resign her Bundestag seat after leaving
the party the day after the September election and vowing to sit as an independent.
“I don’t have any animosity,” Weidel was quoted saying. “I think it’s a shame that she left the AfD. I consider it the wrong decision.”
Petry this month launched her Blue Party, promising a “reasonable conservative” agenda and attacking the AfD leadership for holding views too far outside the mainstream.
Coalition negotiations between Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union, the pro-business Free Democrats and the Green Party, are expected to be lengthy because the parties are divided over key issues like immigration.
Right-wingers at the talks are demanding a hard cap on migrant numbers, which the Greens say is a red line, leaving talks deadlocked.
In an interview with Welt am Sonntag, Weidel’s comparison with Britain in the 1970s was stretched as Germany is Europe’s economic powerhouse with a record budget surplus of €18.3 billion in the first half of this year.
Last month, Weidel was in the news after the publication of an email allegedly sent by Weidel that called the government “pigs” and said German guilt over the Second World War was to blame for immigration. She said the email was fake.
The AfD at the weekend abandoned a bid to collect data on the ethnicity and sexual orientation of journalists who want to access the party’s national congress, after protests from media groups.

Role model: Margaret Thatcher, with Israel’s Golda Meir in 1976. Picture credit: Wikimedia