The AfD delegation in the European Parliament wants to exclude the AfD’s top candidate for the European elections, Maximilian Krah, from the Identity and Democracy (ID) group. A corresponding application was submitted to the parliamentary group by the head of the delegation Christine Anderson. First, ZDF and the World reported about it.
Krah only resigned from the party’s federal executive board on Wednesday. The politician himself announced this on the X platform. In doing so, he forestalled a possible expulsion by the AfD leadership, which had previously spoken to Krah about the further European election campaign. The reason was an announcement by Marine Le Pen’s extreme right-wing French party Rassemblement National (RN) that it would break with the AfD, its German partner in the European Parliament – because of Krah’s statements.
:The deep fall of Maximilian Krah
On Tuesday evening, Maximilian Krah was still talking about “fictitious allegations” in the Allgäu. A day later, the AfD’s leading candidate for the European elections had to leave the campaign stage and the federal executive board because he was stringing affair after affair.
The AfD also banned Krah from appearing. A corresponding report from the PictureA party spokesman confirmed this to the dpa news agency. Krah himself told X that he would not be making any further campaign appearances. Two weeks before the European elections, the party finds itself in the strange situation of not wanting to have anything to do with its leading candidate in the election campaign.
The Rassemblement National’s break with the AfD was preceded by an interview with Krah in the Italian newspaper La Republica from the weekend. In it, he claimed that not all members of the SS were criminals. “I will never say that everyone who wore an SS uniform was automatically a criminal,” said Krah. When asked whether the SS were war criminals, he replied: “There was certainly a high percentage of criminals, but not all of them were criminals.” The National Socialist SS guarded and administered the concentration camps, among other things, and was largely responsible for war crimes. At the Nuremberg trials after the end of the Second World War, it was declared a criminal organization.
At the beginning of May, investigators also had Krah’s offices in a building of the European Parliament in Brussels were searched. It had previously become known that Jian G., an employee of the AfD politician, was suspected of spying for China in the European Parliament and of spying on the Chinese exile community in Germany. G. was arrested in Dresden on April 22 and is in custody.
It is unclear what will happen next with the AfD’s European election campaign. According to the wishes of the party leadership, number two on the European list, Petr Bystron, will no longer appear due to public prosecutor’s investigations.
Meanwhile, Krah remains the party’s top candidate, the AfD list for the European elections in two weeks has been finalized, and his entry into the next European Parliament is thus practically certain – even if the party no longer officially wants to campaign with him.