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AfD candidate for chancellor uses party conference to try and ride wave propelling populists in Europe and US to power

Alice Weidel could not have hoped for a better backdrop to her coronation as the candidate for chancellor of the far-right Alternative for Germany.

Fresh from a much-hyped online chat with new fan Elon Musk, she thanked the Tesla chief executive and ally of incoming US president Donald Trump for his willingness to live-stream the AfD conference on his social media platform X.

“Freedom of speech!” she proclaimed in English, before launching into a fiery anti-immigration speech at the gathering in the small east German town of Riesa this weekend.

Weidel’s courting of the world’s richest man is part of an effort to tap into a global populist wave that propelled the hard-right Giorgia Meloni to power in Italy in 2022, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally to a first-round victory in French elections last summer and delivered Trump’s re-election in November.

Senior AfD party members were also fizzing with excitement at the far right’s historic breakthrough in Austria, where the leader of the Freedom party was last week given the chance to form a government.

“It is part of a tectonic shift in western democracies,” said Andreas Rödder, a historian at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. “The pendulum is moving towards the right and this is what the AfD has connected itself to.”

At home in Germany, the party has already secured a string of historic successes. It came second in European elections in June, and last autumn won as much as 33 per cent in regional votes in a strong performance in three eastern states — including in Saxony, where Riesa is located — even after allegations about links between senior party members and Russian and Chinese espionage.

Polls now suggest that the AfD — which rails against Muslims, lambasts “woke” culture and wants to lift sanctions on Russia — is on course to claim its first ever second place finish in federal elections on February 23 with a record 20 per cent of the vote.

Weidel, 45, does not fit the stereotype of a rightwing radical. She is married to Sri Lankan-born Swiss film producer Sarah Bossard, with whom she lives together with their two adopted children in Switzerland. After graduating, she spent time as an analyst for Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt and later wrote a doctoral thesis on the Chinese pension system.

Analysts see Weidel as the party’s attempt to present a more palatable face to the public in a country where many still attach great seriousness to avoiding repeating the mistakes that led to its dark Nazi past. During smiling television interviews or in videos posted on TikTok, her appearance is often deliberately softer than some of the ultra right-wing radicals in her party.

But there was little of her lighter side on display during her fist-pumping, 20-minute speech in Riesa, where she appealed to the party faithful by lambasting the “leftist mob” of protesters who delayed the start of the conference by two hours. 

She embraced the highly charged term of “remigration” as she promised “large scale deportations of immigrants” and railed against a string of attacks in recent years by migrants and asylum seekers.

Many saw her inflammatory language as a concession to the firebrand Björn Höcke, who led the party to victory in regional elections in the eastern state of Thuringia in September and has been convicted for invoking the nationalistic language of Adolf Hitler’s storm troopers.

In the latest attempt by the party to reference the Nazi era without falling foul of the law, another regional party chief encouraged the crowd to chant “Alice für Deutschland” — a pun on the forbidden slogan “Alles für Deutschland”, meaning “everything for Germany”.

Those who knew Weidel during her stint in finance two decades ago struggle to reconcile that woman with today’s far-right leader.

Jim Dilworth, a US banker living in Germany who worked with her at Goldman and later at Allianz Global Investors, said that she did not display any rightwing views at the time. “The most ‘radical’ thing about her views was her scepticism about the euro as a common currency,” he said.

Dilworth added that when he later expressed surprise at her decision to join the AfD, she told him that “it would take me 20 years” to make the same progress in the more centre-right Christian Democrats. “So that’s basically why she chose this party. I think there was a lot of opportunism there.”

The AfD co-leader denied having made such a remark. She told the Financial Times via a spokesman: “I never said that. It doesn’t make any sense. Nobody, and certainly not back then, joined the AfD for the sake of their career.”

Weidel’s political persona is one of carefully controlled conservatism. She wears crisp white shirts, often with pearls, and her hair in a neat low bun. She argues that her party is not right-wing extremist but rather conservative liberal.

Asked to explain the apparent incongruity between her private life and her party’s opposition to “gender and woke ideology” in 2023, she said: “I am not queer. I am just married to a woman who I have known for 20 years.” Or, as one senior party official put it: “She is just gay by biology but not by political conviction.”

Kay Gottschalk, an AfD member of parliament who first met Weidel around the time that she joined the national executive committee in 2015, said she was “perfect” for reaching out to groups where the party has traditionally unperformed, including women voters.

Her critics warn it is an act. The co-leader of the ruling Social Democrats, Lars Klingbeil, has described her as “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”.

Analysts and even some of her own allies within the AfD argue that, even as the party looks set to double its support from 10 per cent in the last federal election in 2021, Weidel can only take part of the credit.

Deep public discontent with Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to welcome around 1mn migrants and asylum seekers helped the AfD expand from its 2013 origins as a single-issue party opposed to the euro.

The deep unpopularity of SPD chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-way “traffic light” coalition, which collapsed in November, has also been vital in sending new voters to the AfD. So too have lukewarm attitudes towards the election frontrunner, Christian Democrat leader Friedrich Merz, as well as widespread angst about the stagnating German economy and the future of the country’s manufacturing industry.

“The dissatisfaction with the other parties is huge,” said a senior AfD official. “We are profiting from that.”

Yet Weidel, who has been AfD co-leader since 2019, has also proved to be a survivor in an outfit notorious for infighting. Insiders say she has been deft at managing the party’s radical flank.

No matter how well it performs, the party has almost no hope of taking power in Berlin after next month’s vote due to the “firewall” erected by Germany’s mainstream parties, which have all ruled out forming a coalition with the AfD.

But its officials are already looking to the next set of elections, scheduled for 2029, when they hope an even stronger showing might force other parties to drop their resistance to cooperating. They take particular inspiration from Austria’s Herbert Kickl, who last week was asked by the country’s president to form a government after attempts by centrist parties to form a coalition that excluded his Freedom party failed.

“It looks like a pattern, and they are exploiting it,” said Rödder, the historian. “They are pointing to Austria to say: ‘It is Germany in four years’.”

The scale of global mining required as part of the ‘energy transition’ has staggering environmental implications.

Mining is having a moment. Pundits and politicians have rediscovered the reality that extracting minerals from the earth is both critical for a modern economy and an inherently dirty business. Journalists writing about the industry often invoke both its strategic importance and William Blake’s “dark satanic mills.”

Rhenium, for instance—the last of all naturally occurring stable elements to be discovered, some 100 years ago—is what makes possible today’s superconductors and high-temperature alloys for jet engines. We use minerals to create all sorts of magical devices, from lasers and MRI machines to computer chips and, of course, lithium batteries, which power everything from our smartphones to our electric vehicles.

In “Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future,” Vince Beiser, a journalist and author whose previous book explored the role of sand in our economy, now turns to the mining implications of an “energy transition”—the push to replace conventional fuels and cars with batteries energized by wind and solar machinery.

Civilization as we know it would not exist without the earth’s minerals. Anthropologists use the terms Bronze Age and Iron Age for a reason. Meanwhile, observers have long raised concerns about mining’s effects on our health and the environment. Writing about land that has been polluted from mining in “On Airs, Waters and Places” more than 2,500 years ago, the Greek physician Hippocrates warned that “good waters cannot proceed from such a soil.”

Our modern strategic worries began shortly after World War I, when military planners realized that the nation and its war machinery were dependent upon imports for many essential minerals. In 1922 Congress established a military board to stockpile 42 strategic metals, including tungsten, vanadium and chromium. The 1939 Strategic and Critical Materials Stock Piling Act, updated in 1979, 1987, 1994 and 2023, was intended to encourage domestic mining and reduce import dependencies.

The past century has seen countless government studies about America’s reliance on imported minerals. In 1980 President Jimmy Carter signed the bipartisan National Materials and Minerals Policy, Research and Development Act calling for the coequal pursuit of mineral production and environmental protection. In the years since, the latter has crushed the former, stifling the American mining industry. Today the world mines more stuff than ever before—just not in the U.S.

As I’ve written before on these pages, “global mining today involves excavating and moving a quantity of rock each year equivalent to the tonnage of 7,000 Great Pyramids. Transition aspirations would require a tonnage north of 50,000 pyramids annually.” Clearly such scale isn’t only difficult—it’s near impossible. The mere attempt has staggering environmental implications. Mr. Beiser wastes no time uncovering that truth. The title to his introduction: “There’s No Such Thing as Clean Energy.”

Mr. Beiser tells us he wants “to make clear the extent of the damage” that mining inflicts. He concludes his introduction by teasing that “we need a whole new approach.” Spoiler alert: It’s about all of us using far less stuff and especially having far fewer cars of any kind.

The book mostly chronicles the author’s fascinating visits to people at myriad global mine sites. We learn about urban mining and the complex choreography of metal scavengers. On the subject of recycling, the author correctly concludes: “Recycling helps. But as a solution, utterly inadequate.”

He discovers the reality that people who make a living “dealing only with dematerialized abstractions, intellectual ‘products’ that exist mainly on computers” in fact depend on all manner of machines “made with metals.” Echoing the poet Blake, Mr. Beiser calls this a “Faustian bargain.” Here I disagree. Humans are, to use the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s term, homo faber—makers of tools and machines that create near magical productivity and value. It’s a great bargain.

The book’s dénouement and final chapter is devoted to the Netherlands’ love of the bicycle, which Mr. Beiser holds as “the single best way we can reduce the damage done by our consumption of both minerals and energy.” That conviction is shared by many transitionists and the International Energy Agency, which hopes the share of global households without a car will nearly double by 2050. California has similar aspirations.

Mr. Beiser marches through the car prohibitionists’ standard fare, from accidents to land use, offering the usual palliatives for taking away your car, such as the benefits of exercise. “We need, in short, to redesign our cities, to orient them around human beings rather than automobiles.” Never mind those humans who want or need cars.

The author revisits a widely repeated trope that there’s a generational shift away from cars to “micromobility,” the techie term for peddled and battery-propelled bicycles, but he ignores the recent data that shows otherwise. One MIT study found that millennials exhibit “little difference in preferences for vehicle ownership” and “in contrast to anecdotes, we find higher usage in terms of vehicle miles traveled.” Meanwhile, a 14-country survey released last year found that people under 30 “love cars and are neither ready nor willing to live without them.” In the U.S., 75% of respondents expressed an attachment to their cars; across Europe the average was 83% of respondents, while in China the proportion ballooned to 97%.

It’s true, as Mr. Beiser notes, that many cities are embracing the means for making cycling convenient and driving inconvenient. New York City has added nearly 600 miles of bicycle lanes to its roadways in the past decade. And now it has introduced a congestion toll, to further raise the cost of driving in Manhattan. Who benefits? In the U.S. we have data on that too: 0.5% of all commuters use a bicycle. The average age of those who commute by bike is 20 to 30, 70% male, 70% white and 80% with a college degree. Universal and diverse this is not.

One can conclude from Mr. Beiser’s chronicle that we face serious challenges in meeting humanity’s minerals needs. The single best way to help that? Don’t subsidize and mandate energy machines that exponentially increase the demand for minerals. If you’re already in a hole, stop digging.

Private equity-backed petrol station business expected to list as early as this year

Private equity-backed petrol station company EG Group has fired the starting gun on a stock market listing in New York, expected to come as early as this year. 

The initial public offering, which could value the business at about $13bn, would allow TDR Capital to cash out some of its investment more than a decade after first backing Blackburn’s billionaire Issa brothers. 

Zuber Issa, who co-founded EG with his brother Mohsin but stepped back from management last year, told the Sunday Times newspaper that “the road map is starting now” on an IPO, expected to materialise this year or next, having considered various options for the group for some time.

EG would probably float under the name of Cumberland Farms, the American convenience-store operator that it bought in 2019, a person familiar with the matter confirmed.

The decision of two of the UK’s highest profile entrepreneurs and TDR to list their business in the US would be another blow for London’s stock market, which has been grappling with both a drought of new offerings and high-profile defections.

The brothers started out with one petrol station, near to where they grew up in Blackburn, Lancashire in 2001. They have expanded the business at breakneck speed to more than 5,500 sites in nine countries, partly through debt-fuelled acquisitions facilitated by their tie-up with TDR.

TDR and the Issas now own about 50 per cent each of EG.

Zuber said the choice of New York was driven by the fact that despite the business’s roots in northern England, more than half of its earnings were now in the US.

He also cited the presence of other listed rivals in North America, such as Canada’s Alimentation Couche-Tard and Nasdaq-listed Casey’s General Stores, which makes it easier for investors to benchmark performance. In 2022, there was speculation that Alimentation Couche-Tard and EG were in merger talks.

“If we had still had [the majority of] our assets in the UK, we would have had a much closer look at a UK IPO,” Zuber told the Sunday Times.

EG no longer has any UK convenience stores and petrol forecourts, after selling the bulk of them to the supermarket group Asda, a sister business also owned by TDR Capital and Mohsin.

EG, where Zuber remains a shareholder and non-executive director, delivered underlying profit of $1.1bn for the year to December 31 2023, on revenues of $28.3bn. It also cut its net debt burden from about $10bn in January 2023 to $5.3bn at the end of September last year.

Although the brothers only struck the deal to buy Asda from Walmart with TDR in 2020, Zuber sold his stake to the private equity group last year, formalising a split.

Zuber suggested that his reason for taking a step back from EG was driven by TDR’s desire to pursue an IPO at a faster pace than which he was comfortable. Mohsin now runs EG as sole chief executive.

“TDR has backed EG since 2014 and anything that EG decides [to do] is driven by the board and a decision the company makes,” a person close to TDR said.

“The notion this is shareholder driven is quite far-fetched. It’s not about an exit, it’s about setting the business up for [the] next stage of growth.” 

TDR and EG declined to comment.

The power producer agreed to buy Calpine this past week for $16.4 billion and has become an industry darling amid surging electricity demand

Three years ago Constellation Energy CEG 25.16%increase; green up pointing triangle was spun out of the utility Exelon, hived off as an unwanted company running nuclear power plants that might close.

This past week, Constellation’s stock hit a record high, and it signed one of the power industry’s largest acquisitions.

Constellation, the country’s biggest producer of nuclear power, agreed to buy the private-equity-owned Calpine, a major generator of natural gas-fired and geothermal power for $16.4 billion, plus debt. Shares rose 25% on Friday, and it was the second-best performer in the S&P 500 that day.

It is part of a remarkable turnaround for Constellation, Calpine and other power producers, which have emerged from years of ho-hum electricity demand as the newly popular kids. Constellation’s stock has risen roughly 575% since the spinout.

The industry’s glow is due in large part to the boom in demand for electricity-hungry artificial-intelligence computing. That trend has sent the wealthy tech sector on a desperate hunt for city-sized amounts of power for new data centers.

Tech companies have preferred wind, solar or nuclear power because they avoid carbon emissions. But in practical terms, power demand is rising so quickly that companies can’t be picky. For now, sustainability commitments are taking a back seat to tech companies’ desire to rapidly build data centers, according to analysts.

The deal for Calpine, and its fleet of natural-gas plants, is a shift for Constellation, which investors have viewed as a bet on nuclear power’s future in the U.S. Constellation Chief Executive Joe Dominguez says tech companies and others are running out of carbon-free power options.

“They’re going to have to use some natural gas, and we want to be able to participate in that,” Dominguez said.

Nuclear renaissance

In 2022, Exelon was among several utilities selling competitive generation businesses. Constellation’s pitch to investors and lawmakers was that the country would increasingly need nuclear’s reliable and carbon-free generation.

While nuclear plants provide a reliable backbone to electric grids across the country, many had folded under competitive pressures from natural gas and renewables. Several states had stepped in with tax credits or other forms of support to halt closures.

Within weeks of the spinout, Russia invaded Ukraine, which sent natural-gas prices higher and prompted a rethink of global energy security, including the value of nuclear plants.

In August 2022, federal tax credits for nuclear power were approved under the Inflation Reduction Act, giving generators like Constellation a price floor to ensure that plants could stay open. Constellation has since notched improvements to its credit rating, too, which was earlier considered almost speculative.

Last September, Constellation and Microsoft signed a high-profile deal to restart the undamaged reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, the site of the nation’s biggest civilian power accident. Constellation also plans license extensions at existing plants and “upratings” to produce more nuclear power at existing reactors.

There are a limited number of such projects, though, and building new nuclear plants will be costly and time-consuming.

Small modular reactors, which developers say could be delivered faster and cheaper than conventional nuclear plants, have created a lot of excitement but aren’t yet available. Other new, clean and reliable technologies are in early stages, too.

“New nuclear is a good bit away in our estimation,” Dominguez said. “We believe gas is going to be part of the solution set for businesses for at least the next couple of decades and quite honestly probably more. We’ve understood that for a while, and so we don’t think of this as a pivot.”

Natural-gas needs

When private-equity firm Energy Capital Partners and a group of co-investors agreed to take Calpine private in 2017, Tyler Reeder, president and managing partner of ECP, said the purchase was “a little bit contrarian.”

“We would hear a frequent question around gas-fired assets, questions around obsolescence or how much longer we would need these assets,” Reeder said. “In some markets I think it was overstated that these assets wouldn’t be needed five or 10 years out. We had a very different view.”

ECP liked Calpine’s geothermal assets, including The Geysers complex with 13 plants in northern California. It has also developed large battery-storage and solar projects.

In the past year, the consensus on how much natural gas will be needed has increased sharply with electricity demand forecasts.

Discussions between Constellation and Calpine leaders had been going on for about two years, though they picked up last fall, Dominguez said.

ECP and its partners have agreed to hold Constellation shares for 18 months. Reeder said it allows them to start an exit but stay invested in the idea that a combined company can meet the wave of data-center demand. “We just believe in it. We’re not in any way running for the door here,” Reeder said.

The addition of natural gas-fired plants will expose Constellation to more commodity price risk, said Scott Wilmot, analyst at Enverus Intelligence Research.

The companies will need approvals for the deal from federal and state regulators, too.

“Given the increased political and overall attention on power demand, we would expect a protracted process and likely opposition from stakeholders, including regulated utilities,” analysts at Jefferies said.

Constellation said it could sell some assets in markets that overlap with Calpine, especially in the PJM Interconnection, the regional transmission organization and electricity market serving Washington, D.C., and all or part of 13 states.

JPMorgan event follows the murder of an industry leader and the nomination of a vaccine sceptic as top official

Healthcare executives, dealmakers and investors will gather in San Francisco this coming week at a tumultuous moment for the industry following the murder of a top executive and Donald Trump’s nomination of a vaccine sceptic as the top US health official.

“We’re entering San Francisco this year with a higher level of uncertainty than we have in the past, largely because some of the policy unknowns,” said John Maraganore, the former chief executive of $30bn biotech Alnylam Pharmaceuticals who now advises boutique bank Jefferies and venture capital firm Arch Venture Partners.

About 8,000 people are expected to attend the JPMorgan healthcare conference in San Francisco’s Union Square. In total more than 60,000 people will travel to the city for the event, which is typically a magnet for biotech deals.

Over the past year, the SPDR S&P Pharmaceuticals ETF, which groups together large-cap pharmaceutical stocks, was flat, while the wider S&P 500 index was up nearly 22 per cent.

The nomination of Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has spread conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 vaccine and criticised blockbuster weight-loss drugs, to run the health department as well as several of his allies to run its powerful agencies has injected extra uncertainty.

The security presence at the conference has been significantly bolstered following the murder of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson in midtown Manhattan in November in what prosecutors alleged was “an act of terrorism” waged against the healthcare industry by 26-year-old Ivy League graduate Luigi Mangione.

“Everyone’s on higher alert this year, but I’m not going to do anything different than pay more attention to what my security team tells me I can and can’t do,” said Brent Saunders, the chief executive of eyecare company Bausch + Lomb.

Saunders said policy uncertainty had been “like a cold bucket of water on the sector”. But he added that “I’ve lived through several administrative changes as a CEO and you tend to not get too worried about it.”

Several managed care companies will not be in attendance this year, but people close to them stressed that their absence was unrelated to security concerns. UnitedHealth never attends, CVS pulled out after the departure of its chief executive in October and Cigna will also not attend, according to people familiar with the matter.

Local police officers’ leave has been cancelled to ensure the San Francisco Police Department has sufficient resources for the event, according to a person familiar with the plans.

Kosta Kleyman, a healthcare investor at investment manager Columbia Threadneedle, pointed out that the discontent towards health insurers that emerged in the aftermath of Thompson’s killing had created a “negative sentiment” around insurer stocks and a sell-off at the end of last year as investors fretted over policy changes.

Despite the uncertainty, Peter Kolchinsky, managing partner of $10bn biotech venture capital fund RA Capital, said he was bullish about the outlook for the sector. “I think that medicine in America operates with a lot of checks and balances and can handle ideological shifts.”

“All people want medicines that really work,” added Kolchinsky. “For example, outbreaks among the unvaccinated remind the rest of us that life is better with vaccines. Ideology isn’t everything.”

Fred Hassan, the former chief executive of Schering-Plough who now advises private equity group Warburg Pincus, said: “There’s a lot of good science that got started in the 2021-22 period and is struggling to get funded, so hopefully at JPMorgan, we are going to hear some good news about the sector loosening up.”

In a sign that brighter days may be ahead, there were already glimmers of hope over the weekend that big drugmakers were beginning to spend on mergers and acquisitions, either to resolve patent cliffs or to diversify their pipeline. Both GSK and Eli Lilly were in late-stage talks to acquire cancer-focused biotechs, the Financial Times reported, while Biogen made a nearly $500mn unsolicited bid for depression drugmaker Sage Therapeutics.