Germany’s AfD excludes top candidate from EU delegation

BERLIN (AFP): The top candidate for Germany’s far-right AfD at the EU polls will be excluded from the party’s delegation at the European Parliament due to a string of scandals, his party said Monday.

Maximilian Krah has been accused of having suspicious links to Russia and China, while comments that he made minimising the crimes of the Nazis’ notorious SS also prompted the AfD’s expulsion from the far-right group within the parliament.

A day after making strong gains and coming in second in Germany’s EU elections, the Alternative for Germany’s newly elected MEPs voted to boot the 47-year-old out of their parliamentary delegation, a spokesman confirmed.

Krah will still enter parliament, however.

The AfD delegation will now be led by Rene Aust, who made regular media appearances during the party’s election campaign.

A local lawmaker in eastern Thuringia state, the 37-year-old is said to be close to Bjoern Hoecke, a prominent AfD member who was last month convicted and fined for deliberately using a banned Nazi slogan.

Krah found himself at the centre of a deepening crisis after one of his aides in the EU parliament was arrested on suspicion of spying for China.

He and another key AfD candidate, Petr Bystron, have also been forced to deny allegations they accepted money to spread pro-Russian positions on a Moscow-financed news website.

After the scandals emerged, the AfD moved to ban Krah from EU election campaign events although it was electorally too late to remove him from the top of its list for the poll.

Krah then told an Italian newspaper that not every member of Germany’s SS was “automatically a criminal”.

The comments prompted the party’s expulsion from its far-right group, Identity and Democracy (ID), in the European Parliament, in which France’s National Rally (RN) and Italy’s League had been its partners.

The AfD — which scored a record 16 percent at the EU polls and came ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s SPD — is among a crop of far-right parties that made strong gains at the election.