The leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has announced that he will withdraw from the pro-Europeans campaign, but will also sack the far-right party’s federal executive. The SS, the Nazi paramilitary group, were not “automatically guilty”. “It is necessary to judge crime on a case-by-case basis. By the end of the war there were almost a million SS men. Günter Grass was also a member of the Waffen-SS,” Maximilian Krah told Italian media over the weekend. Marine Le Pen and European far-right leaders rejected the reports and advocated a break with the AfD.
“I recognize that my truthful and nuanced statements are being misused as a pretext to harm our party,” Kraw wrote on the X social network yesterday. “The last thing we need now is a discussion about me. The AfD needs to maintain its unity. For this reason, I will refrain from participating in the campaign with immediate effect and resign as a member of the Central Executive Committee,” he added.
Although Kra has become a risk, the AfD has no choice but to keep him at the head of the list for Europeans, as the rules prohibit any change after March 18 – with the only exception being a prison sentence with a criminal sentence. At least five years. However, Craw may decide not to take office after the election.
MEP since 2019, Maximilian Krah is no newcomer when it comes to controversy. He and another AfD candidate for Europeans, Petr Bystron, recently came out publicly to deny allegations that they accepted money to promote pro-Russian positions on a Moscow-funded news website. At the same time, the German judiciary opened a preliminary investigation against Krau over alleged suspicious payments from China and Russia.
This series of scandals has damaged the AfD’s polling ambitions – in December, polls gave the German far-right party 25%, at the time it was capitalizing on discontent over increased immigration and a weak economy, but it has been in decline since then. Following the controversy, a survey conducted last week reached 15%.
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