A right-wing German lawmaker made comments seen as so explosively outside the mainstream of acceptable political discourse, that his party was disowned by other far-right leaders, breaking a major coalition in the European Parliament. <\/p>\n
Maximilian Krah, of the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, told an Italian newspaper that he didn\u2019t view all members of a notorious Nazi paramilitary group automatically as criminals. He claimed that some in the SS, whose primary role was guarding concentration camps during World War II, were in fact just farmers. <\/p>\n
\u201cBefore I declare someone a criminal, I want to know what he did. Among the 900,000 SS men there were also many farmers: there was certainly a high percentage of criminals, but not all of them were. I will never say that anyone who wore an SS uniform was automatically a criminal,\u201d Krah told La Repubblica last weekend. <\/p>\n
The AfD have since banned the 47-year-old Krah, their leading candidate in next month\u2019s European elections, from making public appearances. Experts say his remarks have also caused reverberations across Europe\u2019s far-right, shining a light on how the continent\u2019s far-right parties view themselves and their associations. <\/p>\n
After Krah\u2019s interview was published on Saturday, his party suspended him on Wednesday, and said that he had taken \u201dfull responsibility\u201d for his actions and agreed to step down from its federal executive board with immediate effect. <\/p>\n
In a scathing statement, the AfD accused Krah of having caused \u201cmassive damage to the party in the current election campaign, for which the candidate had provided the pretext.\u201d <\/p>\n
It is not immediately clear if Krah remains the AfD\u2019s official lead candidate for the upcoming European election. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe only time when there exists this red line is when they feel like it\u2019s hurting their voting result. And that\u2019s the only time when they will act or whether they fear that it will basically change the way German security forces perceive them as the AfD.\u201d <\/p>\n
On Thursday, a far-right coalition of parties in the European Parliament expelled the AfD from the group. <\/p>\n
The Identity and Democracy (ID) bloc said in a statement, they had decided to exclude the AfD, \u201cwith immediate effect,\u201d adding that \u201cthe ID Group no longer wants to be associated with the incidents involving Maximilian Krah, head of the AfD list for the European elections.\u201d <\/p>\n
In Paris, the leaders of French right-wing party National Rally (RN) \u2013 the successor to the Front National led by Marine Le Pen, and part of the ID alliance \u2013 also dissociated themselves from the AfD. <\/p>\n
RN President Jordan Bardella said in a French TV debate on Tuesday that the AfD had \u201ccrossed red lines.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cWe will have new allies after the European elections and will no longer be in the same group as the AfD,\u201d Bardella added. <\/p>\n
\u201cFar-right populists are always trying to appeal to a broad voter base and they are always trying to give themselves an image that seems cleaner than they actually are. We know that Le Pen\u2019s party has been trying to clean up their image in the past couple of years. She broke with her father, the founder of that party, because of that.\u201d <\/p>\n
Blumenthaler described this image cleansing as the \u201cmost absurd dynamic that we have, a new far-right self-consciousness all over Europe.\u201d <\/p>\n
That sense of self-awareness doesn\u2019t seem to extend to the AfD, though. <\/p>\n
There have been a series of incidents where AfD members have expressed far-right ideologies openly in Germany. Recently scandals have also seen members accused of spying for China and accepting bribes from Russia. <\/p>\n
H\u00f6cke, a former history teacher, intends to run as the lead candidate for the AfD in the upcoming state elections in September, and is currently the clear favorite to win. <\/p>\n
According to Blumenthaler, these incidents don\u2019t appear to hurt the party, especially in Germany. <\/p>\n
\u201cAfter basically crashing the (far-right) European coalition, that really hurts the AfD on a European level, but I don\u2019t really think that it will affect their electoral base here in Germany that much,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n
The AfD\u2019s open radicalism is an interesting phenomenon for Blumenthaler too, especially when compared to its European allies. <\/p>\n
The AfD is under domestic surveillance for the threat it poses to Germany\u2019s democracy and despite a recent dip is currently polling higher than each of the three parties in the coalition now governing the country. <\/p>\n
D\u00fcker noted a similarity between the AfD and Donald Trump, adding that: \u201cThe more scandals and the more outrageous things the ex-President said, the more his followers seemed to commit to him even more. And something similar appears to be going on with the AfD.\u201d <\/p>\n
Barbie Nadeau in Rome and James Frater in London contributed to this report.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A right-wing German lawmaker made comments seen as so explosively outside the mainstream of acceptable political discourse, that his party was disowned by other far-right leaders, breaking a major coalition in the European Parliament. Maximilian Krah, of the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, told an Italian newspaper that he didn\u2019t view all members of a <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3726,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3725","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3725\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}