The European Parliament’s right-wing populist Identity and Democracy (ID) group voted to expel the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party following the controversy around its lead candidate’s statements relativizing the SS, despite AfD’s best efforts to contain the fallout and distance itself from the radical politician.
According to Bild, five out of the group’s eight delegations supported the motion to exclude AfD just two weeks before the EU elections, including Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN), Matteo Salvini’s Lega, the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang, the Danish People’s Party (DF), and the Czech SPD.
Only the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) and Estonia’s Conservative People’s Party stood by AfD, but were voted down by the rest of the group on Thursday, May 23rd.
The decision was made though the AfD’s had tried to smooth over the crisis by kicking out the party’s lead candidate, MEP Maximilian Krah, from the AfD leadership and banning him from further campaigning.
His party colleagues in the European Parliament have even requested that Krah would be expelled from the party on Thursday, but it was too late. In her letter to the party’s executive committee, AfD MEP Christine Anderson argued that ID doesn’t have a problem with AfD itself, but has a “massive problem” with Krah due to his “personality structure.”
Anderson added that expelling Krah would be the “last (albeit desperate!) attempt to prevent the exclusion of the entire AfD delegation” from ID with disastrous consequences, including “financial damage in the millions.”Krah has always been a highly divisive character, even among his own colleagues. Last year, it was other AfD MEPs who raised suspicions about Krah’s assistant and his connections with the Chinese government, in the hope of the party removing Krah from his post in Brussels. At the same time, AfD in Germany has long been struggling with the internal threat presented by a small but radical faction, the Flügel, whose members, including Krah, would have rather quit the ID group in favor of leading a new group even further to the right.
