German far-right EU lead candidate forced to suspend campaign, party membership under threat

6 months ago 28

The German far-right AfD has barred their lead EU candidate, Maximilian Krah, from any further campaign events amid mounting pressure to suspend his membership in AfD’s next EU delegation in the wake of a series of scandals that rattled the party in recent months.

Two weeks before the European elections, the AfD’s largest partner in their political group in the European Parliament, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, announced they “will no longer sit together” in the ID group after June’s EU elections, as they seek to moderate their image.

In an extraordinary telephone conference on Wednesday morning, the AfD leadership discussed the first measures to remedy the fall-out at the European level and decided that Krah would be prohibited from participating in further campaign events.

Krah himself confirmed this shortly after the meeting: “I am refraining from further election campaign appearances with immediate effect and am stepping down as a member of the [party’s] federal executive board.”

While the AfD voting list is set in stone, the announcement that he would stop campaigning for the EU elections can be seen as a withdrawal from the position of the lead candidate.

Krah said he recognises that “factual and differentiated statements made by me are being misused as a pretext to harm our party”.

“The last thing we need at the moment is a debate about me.”

With this step, the German far-right party is trying to appease their French counterparts, who called off any future cooperation in the European Parliament after Krah downplayed the membership of Germans in the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) during the Third Reich.

In a separate incident, Belgian police raided Krah’s offices in the European Parliament in Brussels on 7 May to search for evidence against his former aide, suspected to have worked for Beijing. Krah himself was not implicated in the investigation.

The pressure is rising to suspend Krah’s party membership and exclude him from the AfD delegation in the European Parliament.

As a first reaction, the EU lead candidate for the far-right ID group, Anders Vistisen from the Danish far-right Dansk Folkeparti (DF) urged the AfD to expel Krah from the party, otherwise, the AfD itself would have no place within the ID.

Krah “has shown with his statements and actions that he does not belong in the ID group,” Vistisen stated on X. “If the AfD does not […] get rid of Krah, the DF’s position is that the AfD must leave the ID group.”

But pressure is also mounting within the AfD itself, with several high-ranking members calling for Krah’s suspension.

On Tuesday night, the Hesse regional AfD board urged their federal leadership to suspend Krah’s membership rights and exclude him from the AfD delegation in the EU parliament and “to request his exclusion from the ID parliamentary group,” in an internal email seen by Euractiv.

The tensions between Le Pen’s party and the AfD escalated on Tuesday when Krah said in an interview with La Repubblica that he would never say “that anyone who wore an SS [Schutzstaffel] uniform was automatically a criminal”.

As a consequence, the Rassemblement National – which tops the polls in France, well ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s party – announced that it would end its cooperation with the AfD in the European Parliament.

For Le Pen, any association with the AfD and their increasing far-right extremism tendencies is becoming more and more dangerous for her ambitions to become the next French president.