Alice Weidel: The banker behind the firewall

Since Sunday night in Magdeburg, when the Alternative für Deutschland took 43.9 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt against 17.2 for a Christian Democratic Union that had run the state for a quarter of a century, the question Germans have spent a decade avoiding has acquired a date and a number. The woman at the centre of it, and the reason a great many Germans find her difficult to place, is Alice Weidel.Consider the biography before the politics, because the biography is the politics. Weidel was born in Gütersloh in 1979, read business and economics at Bayreuth, wrote a doctorate on China's pension system, worked for the Bank of China and spent six years in the country. She admires Margaret Thatcher, chiefly for the stubbornness. Her economics are the ordinary furniture of the free-market right: lower taxes, less bureaucracy, a return to nuclear power.