Maximilian Krah, AfD’s top candidate for the European elections, is leaving the party’s federal executive board. The politician himself announces this on Platform X. The AfD leadership previously discussed the further European election campaign together with Krah. 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 party is now also banning Krah from appearing. A corresponding report from the Picturenewspaper, a party spokesman confirmed to the dpa news agency.
Opinion
:The Teflon test
So far, all allegations seem to have been directed at the AfD’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah. But now new evidence could lead him into unprecedented difficulties.
The break between the Rassemblement national and 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 anyone who wore an SS uniform was automatically a criminal,” Krah said. 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.
At the beginning of May, investigators 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 researching the Chinese exile community in Germany. G. was arrested in Dresden on April 22nd and is in custody.