AfD Co-Leader Alice Weidel via X

Alternative for Germany (AfD) co-chair Alice Weidel has laid out an uncompromising program for a future national government, pledging to restore permanent German border controls, withdraw from the Schengen system and eventually leave the euro.

Her remarks come as the party enters a crucial run of state elections with some of its strongest polling numbers to date.

Speaking in ZDF’s summer interview, Weidel argued that Germany’s existing political and economic model had failed working people while weakening national control over migration. She said the AfD was preparing not merely to influence government policy, but to govern.

“We will govern in the first federal states,” Weidel said. “And we will also govern at the federal level.”

Her sharpest criticism was reserved for Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil, and the globalist political establishment surrounding them. Weidel said she was tired of being “lied to” by politicians who promise one thing and deliver another.

“I no longer want to be lied to by some dimwits sitting up there promising something and doing the exact opposite,” she said. “Either they can’t do it, or it’s intentional.”

The AfD leader also attacked the CDU’s so-called firewall — the refusal by Germany’s established centrist-globalist party to cooperate with the AfD. Weidel called the policy “the most undemocratic thing there is” and predicted it would eventually destroy the CDU’s ability to win national elections.

“I am prepared to work with anyone as long as they are capable and have the interests of our country in mind,” she said. But she added that she would not accept Germans being “ridiculed and lied to” by the CDU and SPD.

Migration, meanwhile, remains at the center of the AfD’s political project. Weidel said the problem begins at Germany’s borders and argued that national authorities must regain direct control over who enters the country.

“We will close them,” she said of the borders, adding that an AfD government would withdraw Germany from Europe’s Schengen free movement zone if necessary. “This contract is being terminated.”

For those who don’t know, the Schengen system generally eliminates routine border controls between participating European states, although Germany has already reintroduced temporary checks on several frontiers. Weidel argues that the existing arrangement leaves Germany vulnerable to secondary migration from southern Europe.
She specifically pointed to recent migrant pressure around Ceuta, Spain’s North African enclave. “We will withdraw from Schengen so that people like those from Ceuta don’t come to us at all,” she said.

Weidel also called for substantially more deportations and fewer naturalizations. She said Germany would stop bringing people from Afghanistan into the country under an AfD government and take a much harder line on the large Syrian population that arrived during the migration crisis of the past decade.

“The Syrians will all be returned to their homeland,” Weidel said. German media have put the Syrian population in the country at roughly 1.3 million, though any return policy would necessarily depend on individual legal status, citizenship and German and international law.

Such proposals form part of a broader remigration agenda aimed at reversing what many Europeans see as the long-term consequences of unrelenting waves of uncontrolled migration. Germany—and other western states—simply cannot maintain social cohesion if immigration continues at levels seen over the past ten years.

The party also increasingly links migration policy to concerns over parallel societies, crime and the cultural integration of communities arriving from Muslim-majority countries.

Weidel’s challenge to the European status quo extends well beyond immigration. She reaffirmed the AfD’s position that Germany should ultimately leave the euro, calling the common currency unstable and arguing that ordinary citizens have borne the costs of its weakening.

“Germany was significantly better off before the introduction of the euro,” Weidel said. She argued that the currency had contributed to what she described as the “broad impoverishment” of working people and the erosion of savings and purchasing power.

The AfD is also campaigning against major elements of Germany’s climate and industrial policy. Weidel renewed her demand to reverse restrictions on combustion-engine vehicles and said politicians should not determine which technologies consumers and manufacturers are allowed to use.

Her preferred approach, she said, is “market and technology openness.” Asked how German manufacturers could compete as electric-vehicle demand expands in China, Weidel said consumers rather than governments should decide which cars they want to drive.

She also questioned the scale of state intervention aimed at combating man-made climate change, arguing that climate variations have always existed. Her economic position, she said, could be summed up as “no intervention in the market and no policy of prohibition.”

AfD co-chair Tino Chrupalla struck a similar tone in his own ARD summer interview. Referring to recent heat, he described the conditions as a “perfectly normal summer” and accused the federal government of using climate fears to justify greater intervention.

Chrupalla also called for postal voting to be abolished, arguing that it should once again become an exceptional rather than routine method of voting. His comments added election-security questions to an already confrontational AfD campaign.

The AfD’s immediate test comes in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD has been polling above 40 percent ahead of the September election. Weidel and Chrupalla have both expressed confidence that the party could soon enter government at state level, with lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund given broad freedom over coalition negotiations.

Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern will follow with their own elections later in September. National polling cited in the source material places the AfD ahead of the CDU, a dramatic reversal from the relative positions of the parties at the 2025 federal election.

The contest is therefore becoming as much about Germany’s political architecture as about individual policies. If the AfD converts its polling strength into state governments, the long-standing firewall around the party will come under far greater pressure.

The AfD’s message to voters is crystal clear: Germany should recover control over borders, migration, monetary policy, energy and industrial regulation from systems she sees as having moved too far from national democratic control. Her opponents counter that leaving Schengen or the euro could impose major economic and diplomatic costs.

The coming state elections will provide the clearest test yet of which argument is gaining ground.

The post Weidel Vows to Close Germany’s Borders, Leave Schengen, Return All Syrians, and Leave Euro as AfD Surges Ahead of State Elections appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.