European elections
AfD bans top candidate Krah from appearing
No more appearances for AfD top candidate Maximilian Krah – that was decided by the AfD leadership after crisis meetings. photo
© Jean-Francois Badias/AP/dpa
The threatened scandal with France’s Rassemblement National was probably too sensitive for the AfD leadership. She doesn’t want any more appearances from Maximilian Krah.
It breaks a good two weeks before the European elections AfD leadership with its top candidate Maximilian Krah. The federal executive board has imposed a ban on Krah appearing, a party spokesman confirmed a report in the “Bild” newspaper.
The AfD leadership had previously held crisis meetings to discuss the further European election campaign with its top candidate Maximilian Krah. A party spokesman confirmed this upon request. AfD regional associations were also involved. The background to this are reports from France that the right-wing nationalist party Rassemblement National around Marine Le Pen no longer wants to work together with the AfD in the European Parliament in the future because of controversial statements by Krah. The AfD leadership would like to continue working with the RN, according to party circles.
According to French media reports, it was about Krah’s interview in the Italian newspaper “La Repubblica” at the weekend. In it he claimed that not all members of the SS were criminals. “I will never say that anyone who wore an SS uniform was automatically a criminal,” Krah told the newspaper. When asked whether the SS were war criminals, he replied: “There were certainly a high percentage of criminals, but not all of them were criminals.” The National Socialist SS guarded and managed, among other things, the concentration camps 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.
The AfD works in the European Parliament with the Rassemblement National and the Italian Lega in the ID faction. There have been disagreements between the AfD and the RN for a long time. After the revelations by the media company Correctiv about a right-wing extremist meeting in Potsdam in January, Le Pen expressed clear criticism.