EU’s far-right bloc expels Germany’s AfD

The European parliament’s far-right bloc has ejected the Alternative for Germany, underscoring deepening divisions among insurgent anti-establishment parties just weeks ahead of EU elections.

The vote to expel all nine AfD MEPs is an attempt to limit the mounting fallout from a scandal surrounding the German party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah. In a joint interview with the Financial Times and Italy’s La Repubblica, Krah said not all members of the Nazi SS were criminals.

“The Identity and Democracy Group in the European parliament has decided today to exclude the German delegation, AfD, with immediate effect,” ID said on Thursday afternoon, referring to a group that includes Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France and Italy’s League.

“The ID Group no longer wants to be associated with the incidents involving Maximilian Krah, head of the AfD list for the European elections,” it said.

The AfD has suspended Krah from campaigning, but it is too close to the election — held between June 6 and 9 — for his name to be removed from ballots.

The ejection by former allies such as Le Pen is a humiliating setback for the German MEPs and caps a disastrous few months of scandals for the party. Although the European parliament will not reconvene until after the elections, it will leave the AfD needing to find a new group in the next session or sit with unaligned MEPs.

With the exclusion of the AfD, the ID is down to just seven parties, the minimum number needed to form an official parliamentary faction. Factions receive additional EU funding and can seek positions of influence such as committee chairs.

The relationship between the AfD and Le Pen’s RN has been particularly strained since the beginning of the year, when investigative journalists in Germany exposed a meeting between AfD officials and ethno-nationalists outside of Berlin in which ideas such as the forced deportation of ethnic-minority German citizens were discussed.

The RN on Wednesday said it would no longer work with the AfD.

With an eye on the next French presidential election, Le Pen’s party has studiously tried to detoxify its image. Meanwhile, the AfD’s politics have drifted further right in the years since the coronavirus pandemic.

The ID decision was close. Austria’s Freedom party — which shares an increasingly hardline ideological ground with the AfD — voted to keep the Germany party within the group, as did Estonia’s Conservative People’s party.

The RN, League and Belgium’s Vlaams Belang voted to eject it. The Czech and Danish members of the bloc abstained, meaning under voting rules they in effect supported the motion to expel the AfD.

As well as controversies over policy and messaging, a series of spy scandals, involving allegations of Chinese and Russian influence, have strained the AfD’s relations with allies.

Krah’s EU parliamentary assistant, Jian Guo, was arrested by German police last month after intelligence agencies said they had evidence he was a spy for Beijing.

The AfD’s second-ranked EU parliamentary candidate, Petr Bystron, is under investigation by German prosecutors for having potentially taken money from Russian oligarchs to act as a pro-Kremlin agent of influence.

Following the vote, the AfD said it had “taken note” of the ID group’s decision and was “optimistic” about the election.

It said: “In order to have a political impact in Brussels, co-operation with related parties is essential. We are therefore confident that we will have reliable partners at our side in the new legislative period.”

Despite its travails, the party is on course to significantly increase its share of the vote compared with 2019. According to the latest polls, 16 per cent of Germans will vote for the party, giving it 15 or 16 MEPs.