German far-right EU top candidate has to abandon election campaign, party membership at risk

Germany’s far-right AfD has banned its EU top candidate Maximilian Krah from any further campaign events as pressure grows to suspend his membership of the AfD’s next EU delegation after a series of scandals rocked the party in recent months.

Two weeks before the European elections, the AfD Her group’s biggest partner in the European Parliament, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, announced that they would “no longer sit together in the ID group” after the EU elections in June in order to moderate their image.

In an extraordinary telephone conference on Wednesday morning, the AfD leadership discussed initial measures to remedy the consequences at European level and decided to ban Krah from taking part in further election campaign events.

Krah himself confirmed this shortly after the meeting: “From now on, I will forego any further election campaign appearances and will resign as a member of the (party) federal executive board.”

While the AfD’s voter list is set in stone, the announcement that it will stop campaigning for the European elections can be seen as a withdrawal from the position of top candidate.

Krah said he recognized that “factual and nuanced statements from me are being used as a pretext to harm our party.”

“The last thing we need right now is a debate about me.”

With the move, the German far-right party is trying to appease its French colleagues, who canceled any future cooperation in the European Parliament after Krah downplayed German membership in the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) during the Third Reich.

In a separate incident, Belgian police searched Krah’s offices at the European Parliament in Brussels on May 7 to search for evidence against his former adviser, who was suspected of working for Beijing. Krah himself was not involved in the investigation.

Pressure is increasing to suspend Krah’s party membership and exclude him from the AfD delegation in the European Parliament.

As a first reaction, the EU’s leading candidate from the right-wing extremist ID group, Anders Vistisen from the Danish right-wing Dansk Folkeparti (DF), called on the AfD to expel Krah from the party, otherwise the AfD itself would have no place in the ID party.

Krah “has shown with his statements and actions that he does not belong to the ID group,” Vistisen explained on X. “If the AfD doesn’t get rid of Krah (…), the DF’s position is that the AfD has to leave the ID faction.”

But pressure is also growing within the AfD itself: several high-ranking members are calling for Krah’s suspension.

On Tuesday evening, the Hessian AfD state executive called on the federal leadership to Suspend Krah’s membership rights and exclude him from the AfD delegation in the EU Parliament and “to request his expulsion from the ID faction,” according to an internal email seen by Euractiv.

Tensions between Le Pen’s party and the AfD escalated on Tuesday, as Krah said in an interview La Republic that he would never say “that anyone who wore an SS (Schutzstaffel) uniform was automatically a criminal.”

As a result, the Rassemblement National – which leads the polls in France far 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 connection to the AfD and its increasingly right-wing extremist tendencies becomes increasingly dangerous for her ambitions to become the next French president.