Controversial AfD party leader for the European elections is looking to flee to the front after all the ‘muck’

“The security services are out to destroy us as the opposition,” shouted Maximilian Krah on a market square in Dresden on Wednesday afternoon. “The search for spies is the answer to our protest.” The AfD party leader for the European elections is returning to office for the first time more than a week after his close associate was arrested for espionage. The fact that his employee is suspected of spying for China is a side issue, the main issue this afternoon is the bold theory that the investigative services arrested Krah’s employee with the aim of weakening the AfD.

Shortly after the arrest, AfD chairmen Tino Chrupalla and Alice Weidel had ordered Krah to stay away from the kick-off of the European election campaign last weekend. The chairmen also decided that no posters of Krah will be hung and that campaign videos featuring him will not be broadcast. But Krah is back, and is looking to escape to the front.

That says a lot about the ambiguous course of the radical right party, which does not know whether to choose attack or defense. It is undeniable that the series of revelations in recent weeks is damaging the party.

Czech secret service

A summary: Maximilian Krah and Member of the Bundestag and number two on the list for the AfD Petr Bystron willingly gave interviews to the Kremlin-paid news platform Voice of Europe. Bystron is under investigation because the Czech secret service appears to have evidence that he received 20,000 euros from that platform. Krah was questioned by the FBI in December for allegedly having contact with a pro-Russian activist who had messaged him about a “compensation” he would pay to Krah.

At the end of April, Jian G., Krah’s employee in Brussels, was arrested, who allegedly reported to Beijing about processes in the European Parliament. The Public Prosecution Service in Dresden is now investigating whether Krah also received money from Russia or China.

The party dropped two percentage points in the polls in the past two weeks, from 19 to 17 percent. Krah should remain out of the picture, was the first reaction of the AfD chairmen. They could no longer replace him as party leader even if they had wanted to, because the ballot papers are already in the making. But a large part of the party calls G.’s arrest six weeks before the European elections a ploy by the “establishment” to discredit the party. The party ideologue, the far-right publicist and publisher Götz Kubitschek, wrote on his blog that the AfD should not give in to public pressure and should instead “attack” and “fight for power.”

Identity and family

Kubitschek is also the publisher of Maximilian Krah’s book, Politics of the right (2023). Kubitschek only has far-right authors in his stable, including Renaud Camus, who wrote a book about the conspiracy theory of the great population of Europe. Krah’s book is offered on the site as package deal with the book by Martin Sellner, the Austrian leader of the extreme right-wing identitarian movement who tries to make the concept of ‘remigration’ more acceptable.

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Much of Krah’s book is about identity and the traditional family. It is clear that Krah sees itself as a species pickup artista man who can help other men have more success with women.

Sometimes he posts videos with tips on TikTok. “Real men are right-wing,” is his personal adage. “More and more men are being left out of the partner market,” says Krah. According to him, the “natural roles of men and women must be restored,” and the “feminization of men must be reversed.” “Feminists are all ugly,” he said at a meeting in February. Women are on average less stupid than men, but also less smart, writes Krah. The archcatholic Krah himself has eight children by three women.

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In any case, Krah has decidedly unscientific and racist ideas about the distribution of intelligence. For example, he believes that there are no large airports in Africa because black people would find too many gates confusing.

In light of such statements, the choice of Krah as party leader for the European elections shows little hesitation about the extreme right-wing ideology in a large part of the AfD and an aversion to the values ​​of liberal democracy. It is therefore hardly surprising that Krah and Bystron like to show themselves in autocracies such as Russia and China.

‘Moscow’s Fifth Column’

The arrest of his employee does not come as a surprise to Krah’s colleagues. Krah has been a committed advocate of the Chinese Communist Party since joining the European Parliament in 2019. Nicolaus Fest, also a MEP for the AfD, recently published a video in which he says that his own party has become a “fifth column of Moscow”. Chairman Chrupalla is “full of hatred” toward the United States, Fest said, and “appeases” the regimes of China, Russia and Iran. Last year on May 8, Chrupalla celebrated the German capitulation in the Second World War at the Russian embassy in Berlin.

The AfD is in the process of throwing Fest out of the party. Other party members resigned of their own accord, now that the party increasingly consists of unadulterated extremists. This is also evident from the list for the European elections. After Krah and Bystron, number three on the list is René Aust, who is also called ‘mini-Höcke’ because of his equally nationalistic ideas as the chairman of the Thuringian AfD Björn Höcke. Number four is Christine Anderson, who is already a Member of the European Parliament and was previously a leader of the anti-Islam movement Pegida.

In Dresden, family man Krah will speak on Wednesday at the ‘AfD Family Party’ in honor of Labor Day. In front of the stage are long benches where people drink beer from plastic cups and smoke cigarettes. “We want to get out of the madhouse,” says Krah about the EU. “But we need a good result in June, regardless of what kind of filth is spread over us.” As number one on the AfD list, Krah, as the parliamentary arm of the far-right influencer Andrew Tate, will most likely take a seat in Brussels again after the summer.

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