The weekly newspaper said it had learned that Weidel had initially paid a female Islamic Studies student to clean her home. When the student left, Die Zeit said, the job was passed on to an asylum-seeker.

Both women were paid 25 Swiss francs (€22, $26) per hour in cash, said the report, and neither had a contract of employment and no invoices were provided.

Read more - 10 things you need to know about Germany's right-wing AfD

Questioned by the newspaper about the legality of such an arrangement, Weidel's lawyer initially said the one-day deadline for a response set by the paper was "too short for the elaboration of relatively complex legal issues."

Weidel's lawyer later told Die Zeit that she had a "friendly contact" with a Syrian who was also a guest in her house. "But that the asylum-seeker was employed in our client's house or had worked as an employee or received a salary is incorrect."

The claim is likely to lead to allegations of hypocrisy, with Weidel having called for tougher asylum laws and accusing the German navy of participating in human trafficking by helping migrant boats in distress.

A fresh new image?

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now polling at between 8 percent and 11 percent and looks set to surpass the 5 percent threshold to gain parliamentary representation after Germany's September 24 general election.

Weidel - who lives in a lesbian relationship with a Swiss partner who was adopted from Sri Lanka as a child - was installed as co-leader of the party in April alongside tweed-jacketed 76-year-old former civil servant Alexander Gauland. The 38-year-old media-savvy business consultant, who spends much of her time in China, was seen as a choice that might represent the AfD in a more outward-looking and liberal light.

Read more - Alice Weidel: The pride of the populists, a mystery to everyone else

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Alexander Gauland Co-chairman Alexander Gauland said the German national soccer team's defender Jerome Boateng might be appreciated for his performance on the pitch - but people would not want "someone like Boateng as a neighbor." He also argued Germany should close its borders and said of an image showing a drowned refugee child: "We can't be blackmailed by children's eyes."

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Alice Weidel Alice Weidel generally plays the role of "voice of reason" for the far-right populists, but she, too, is hardly immune to verbal miscues. Welt newspaper, for instance, published a 2013 memo allegedly from Weidel in which she called German politicians "pigs" and "puppets of the victorious powers in World War II. Weidel initially claimed the mail was fake, but now admits its authenticity.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Frauke Petry German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016. Officers must "use firearms if necessary" to "prevent illegal border crossings." Communist East German leader Erich Honecker was the last German politician who condoned shooting at the border.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Björn Höcke The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia made headlines for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. The comments came just as Germany enters an important election year - leading AfD members moved to expel Höcke for his remarks.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Beatrix von Storch Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts - but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers."

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Marcus Pretzell Pretzell, former chairman of the AfD in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and husband to Frauke Petry, wrote "These are Merkel's dead," shortly after news broke of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Andre Wendt The member of parliament in Germany's eastern state of Saxony made waves in early 2016 with an inquiry into how far the state covers the cost of sterilizing unaccompanied refugee minors. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have sought asylum in Germany, according to the Federal Association for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees (BumF) — the vast majority of them young men.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Andre Poggenburg Poggenburg, head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Alexander Gauland - again ... During a campaign speech in Eichsfeld in August 2017, AfD election co-candidate Alexander Gauland said that Social Democrat parliamentarian Aydan Özoguz should be "disposed of" back to Anatolia. The German term, "entsorgen," raised obvious parallels to the imprisonment and killings of Jews and prisoners of war under the Nazis.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks ... and again Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. Acknowledging Germany's responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, he went on to say Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Andreas Kalbitz The Brandenburg state AfD chief admitted in 2019 to attending a 2007 rally in Greece by the ultranationalist Golden Dawn party at which a swastika flag was raised. "Der Spiegel" had published a leaked report by the German embassy in Athens naming him as one of "14 neo-Nazis" who arrived from Germany for the far-right rally. Kalbitz released a statement saying he took part out of "curiosity." Author: Dagmar Breitenbach



'Pigs and marionettes'

However, with Gauland already fending off allegations of racial incitement, Weidel was left defending herself from accusations of racism with the leaking earlier this week of an email that she had allegedly written.

The email contained references more commonly used by extreme right-wing members of the party, with claims that Chancellor Angela Merkel's government was seeking to flood Germany with "Arabs, Sinti and Roma" and that Germany needed to maintain its "genetic unity." It also referred to the government "pigs" who were "marionettes of the victors of World War II."

However, Weidel's lawyer has insisted that the email was nothing more than a fabrication.

