Le Pen’s party cuts ties with Germany’s AfD after Nazi SS scandal

Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party has cut ties with Germany’s AfD, saying that the hard-Right party has become rudderless and fallen “under the sway of radical groups”.

“The AfD goes from provocation to provocation,” she told Europe 1 radio on Monday, after the AfD’s lead candidate in the European elections claimed that Nazi SS members were “not all criminals”.

“Now it’s no longer time to distance ourselves, it’s time to make a clean break with this movement,” Ms Le Pen said. “It was urgent to establish a ‘cordon sanitaire’.”

After the AfD’s Maximilian Krah made the remarks in an interview with Italian newspaper la Repubblica, a top National Rally figure said the hard-Right German party had “crossed a line that I see as red”.

It means that the two parties, often seen as mirror images of each other in France and Germany, will no longer sit together in the European parliament.

The incident is the latest in a string of embarrassing crises for the AfD, including an espionage scandal – which also involves Mr Krah – and a notorious secret meeting in December where AfD members discussed the mass deportation of immigrants from Germany.

AfD officials announced on Wednesday that they had sanctioned Mr Krah, having decided in a crisis meeting to eject him from the executive board and ban him from all campaigning. He will remain as the AfD’s lead candidate in the elections, but only on paper.

“I am foregoing all appearances and I am resigning from my position on the federal executive board,” the disgraced MEP confirmed later on Wednesday. “The last thing we need right now is a debate about me. The AfD must maintain its unity.”

It comes after Mr Krah’s parliamentary aide, Jian Guo, was arrested by German police on charges of spying for China at the European parliament and on Chinese opposition figures within Germany.

Mr Krah, a member of the EU-China friendship group, is himself under preliminary investigation in Germany for receiving suspicious payments from Russia and China.

Prior to the AfD’s crisis meeting, party sources told German tabloid Bild that the row with Ms Pen’s party was the last straw for the beleaguered MEP.

“Mr Krah will be asked to resign from his position on the federal executive board on his own initiative,” one AfD MP Bundestag told Bild. “The bosses are furious.”

Mr Krah’s deputy, Petr Bystron, has also been banned from campaigning over a separate scandal involving alleged Russian bribes. Both politicians have denied the allegations.

As a result, the AfD will now be heading into the European elections this June with no one at the helm, or as Bild’s report described it total ‘kopflos’.

‘Alles fur Deutschland’

Earlier this month, another senior AfD figure, Bjorn Höcke, was convicted and fined 13,000 euro (£11,000) for using the Nazi SS slogan “alles für Deutschland” in a speech in 2021.

Prosecutors argued that Mr Höcke was well aware that he was repeating a phrase used by Adolf Hitler’s Sturmabteilung [stormtrooper] division.

In response to the verdict, a bullish Mr Höcke told the court: “My impression is that you didn’t have the blindfold of justice on your eyes today, Mr Public Prosecutor... you were not looking for moments of exoneration.”

Perhaps most controversially, senior AfD members were revealed to have attended a secretive meeting with neo-Nazis and other extremists late last year which had discussed the forced deportation of foreigners from Germany.

A key subject of the meeting was how such a policy would be enforced in Germany, should the AfD form part of the next federal government after elections due to be held late next year.

Despite the controversies, the AfD continues to rank at second place nationwide in Germany at around 17 per cent, behind the centre-right CDU party.

However, in recent months their polling performance has slipped and they could soon be overtaken by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left SPD, according to analysis by Politico.