The Distortion of Reality - Why Alice Weidel Explains the World Without Ever Having Seen It

There are images that say more than a thousand words. The photo of an airplane on the runway, with the headline "Afghans miss flight because they were shopping," is such an image. And there are politicians who turn such headlines into a political campaign. Alice Weidel, the frontwoman of the AfD, picked up the motif and turned it into campaign ammunition: "With us no one will miss the plane back home. Promise." It is a slogan designed to provoke outrage, a promise that suggests toughness, and a statement as far removed from the realities of the world as the idyllic Einsiedeln is from Kabul.

Because what is left unsaid here is just as relevant as what is said. Yes, two women missed a connecting flight in Istanbul because they were shopping. That is banal, almost ridiculous, and it was not a political scandal but a human lapse that was corrected within 48 hours. Both women are now in Hanover, living in safety. To construct from this a general indictment against refugees, portraying them as collectively incapable of catching flights and undisciplined, is a deliberate distortion. It is a political reflex aimed not at enlightenment but at agitation.

Alice Weidel links such episodes to her basic thesis: Germany must immediately stop taking in Afghan local staff, it must not allow itself to be blackmailed by "NGO-driven demands." She formulates this from her Swiss refuge, looking out over Lake Zurich, while in Afghanistan women are once again being driven out of schools, journalists are being persecuted, and former employees of German aid organizations are forced to go into hiding because the Taliban keep death lists. Anyone who takes the trouble to ask in Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, or Herat hears different stories: of teachers hiding their children, of women secretly teaching, of people who fear every day that there will be a knock at their door. All of this cannot be grasped from the vantage point of a luxury apartment.

One could offer Ms. Weidel to accompany us on reporting trips. She could see how in eastern Ukraine people have been living in basements for more than two and a half years because Russian artillery shells the cities. She could convince herself that Vladimir Putin is not the great guarantor of peace as he is glorified in parts of the German right, but a war criminal whose troops have left torture chambers, graves, and abducted children in their wake. She could see the faces of those who did not survive the war. And perhaps she would then be more cautious before using terms like "resettlement," publicly defending a war criminal as if it were a logistical procedure and not a matter of life and death. And this is where the responsibility of the voters comes in. The vast majority of AfD voters have never seen Afghanistan, have not stood in eastern Ukraine when the sirens wail, they know the life of local staff who worked for German NGOs only secondhand - and mainly through the distorting mirror of their own political comrades. We would also recommend to Ms. Weidel and her voters our report "The Stolen Generation: Investigation into Russia's Systematic Re-education of Ukrainian Children in the Occupied Territories" at the link https://kaizen-blog.org/en/die-gestohlene-generation-recherche-ueber-die-systematische-umerziehung-russlands-von-ukrainischer-kinder-in-den-besetzten-gebieten/ or "No Bread, No Sound - Afghanistan's Children Die Quietly" at the link https://kaizen-blog.org/en/kein-brot-kein-laut-afghanistans-kinder-sterben-leise/ !

What Ms. Weidel practices is the art of distortion. She takes individual episodes - a missed plane, an open letter from refugees, an NGO press release - and casts them into a narrative that says: Germany is being overrun, it needs a heavy hand. That reality is more complex, that the Bundeswehr and aid organizations promised these people protection, that there is a moral and legal responsibility, is ignored. It is easier to explain the world in slogans than to endure it. Easier to share quotes from Elon Musk online than to confront the consequences of war, flight, and genocide.

Even more absurd, and unfortunately worrying, is when one sees how Weidel and her party now conduct polemical election campaigns. She celebrates polls showing the AfD at 39 percent in Saxony-Anhalt today as if that were a free pass for völkisch politics and proudly proclaims: "One will no longer be able to govern past the AfD." That is not a sober finding, that is a threat to democracy. Even more grotesque is the quote that Weidel spreads widely on her channels - and that actually comes from Elon Musk: "Either Germany votes @AfD or it is the end of Germany." Musk posted this sentence on X on August 31, 2025, once again openly campaigning for the AfD. As an employer in Germany, Musk has already shown how little he values labor rights. This is not analysis, this is apocalypse marketing - and it poisons the political climate a little more every day.

It would be refreshing if Alice Weidel did not judge only from a distance. If she exposed herself to the reality she so likes to comment on. Then she would see that behind every "missed plane" there is a person who may have risked their life to get on board. And that the real question is not who missed the plane, but who has lost their moral compass.