Скачать или смотреть Protesters disrupt ARD TV interview of German far-right AfD leader Alice Weidel

A loud chorus blaring from speakers on Sunday (July 20) disrupted the open air interview of Germany’s public broadcaster ARD with opposition far-right AfD leader Alice Weidel in Berlin.

The Alternative for Germany co-chief spoke to ARD as part of the broadcaster’s summer interview series set up on a stage across the river from parliament where a dozen demonstrators had gathered.

An acoustic loop of “scheiss AfD,” or shit AfD in English was heard almost throughout the half hour interview during which Weidel reiterated her party’s anti-immigrant stance.

Weidel told ARD that under an AfD government, “there would be no citizen's allowance for foreign citizens. And there would only be benefits in kind for asylum seekers, not cash benefits.”

She also said there were 215,000 Syrians living in Germany, the size “of a big city” who had no right to live here.

“So I ask myself: where are the deportations?”

Weidel’s remarks coincided with an Insa poll released on Sunday according to which the AfD currently stands at 24%, coming in second place behind Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative CDU/CSU party.

Weidel is an unlikely public face for a male-dominated, anti-immigration party that depicts itself as a defender of traditional family values and ordinary people.

She is raising two sons with a Sri Lankan-born woman, a filmmaker, and speaks fluent English and Mandarin, having done a doctorate in economics in China.

A western German leading a party that is strongest in the former communist East, she worked for Goldman Sachs and Allianz Global Investors and as a freelance business consultant before entering politics.