The ultra-German party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has become toxic even for its far-right colleagues. This Thursday, the Identity and Democracy (ID) group in the European Parliament expelled the German party “with immediate effect.” The leader of the French National Regroupment (RN), Marine Le Pen, had already established a cordon sanitaire around her family colleagues in the European Parliament due to the statements of her main candidate for the European elections, Maximilian Krah, whitewashing the organization Nazi paramilitary SS. The German ultras have responded that they take note of the decision and that they hope it will be reversed after the EU elections, which are held from June 6 to 9.
“The ID group no longer wants to be associated with incidents involving Krah,” the group said in a statement. In addition to the RN, ID hosts parties such as Matteo Salvini’s Italian League, the Belgian Vlaams Belang or the ultra-Dutch party of Geert Wilders. Until today, also AfD. But the Krah scandal has destroyed that alliance.
The German MEP, in statements to the Italian newspaper The Republic, stated a few days ago: “I will never say that everyone who wore an SS uniform was automatically a criminal.” “Guilty must be evaluated case by case, at the end of the war there were almost a million SS. Even [el Nobel de Literatura y de ideología socialdemócrata] Günter Grass belonged to the Waffen-SS,” he added, without specifying that the author was a teenager at the time. Krah had already been the center of other scandals due to the arrest of one of his advisors, accused of spying for China, and his relationship with the Russian disinformation plot around the propaganda platform. Voice of Europe.
This Tuesday, Le Pen’s party, for which polls show a large increase in votes in the European elections, broke with AfD over Krah’s statements about the SS. The RN had had several disagreements with the German party, which it considered too ultra, now that the French party is trying to normalize its party before the French presidential elections of 2027. “AfD has crossed red lines,” he declared, in a televised debate , Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s right-hand man and head of the RN’s list for the Europeans. The Italian Salvini did not take long to follow in his footsteps. Both parties made it clear that they would look for “new allies after the European elections,” as Bardella said, and that they would not sit on the same bench with the AfD.
The German far-right party has tried to plug the leak and removed Krah from the party’s executive committee on Wednesday. Furthermore, the MEP assured that he had decided to stay quiet, out of the spotlight and that he would no longer campaign. It hasn’t been enough. The ID group cannot afford to lose Le Pen’s RN – thanks to which it will add, if the polls hold, a good number of seats in the next European Parliament – and has chosen to expel the German ultras. Krah’s, moreover, has not been the only scandal of the German political formation, since another of his candidates faces accusations of bribery and money laundering. Despite all this, since the AfD has fallen slightly in the polls, it still maintains a support of 16% of voters, behind the Christian Democrats of the CDU/CSU and ahead of the three parties that currently govern Germany: Social Democrats, green and liberal.
“AfD will strive to get a powerful group in the European Parliament with a larger delegation,” the party’s federal spokespersons, Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, said in a statement this Thursday. “To have a political impact in Brussels, cooperation with related parties is essential. That is why we trust that in the new legislature we will have reliable partners at our side,” they added.
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After the elections (in Spain they vote on June 9), the groups and alliances will be reconfigured. AfD slips that it hopes to return to ID, but it could find itself drawn into the non-registered group in which, for example, Fidesz, the party of Hungarian national-populist Viktor Orbán, is now.
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