German far right picks EU lead candidate, wants
European anti-migrant ‘fortress’
AfD slams EU as ‘deeply undemocratic’ and questions
legitimacy of the European Parliament — but still hopes to gain seats in the
assembly.
BY HANS VON
DER BURCHARD
JULY 30,
2023 6:06 PM CET
Germany’s
increasingly popular far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party elected
the controversial MEP Maximilian Krah as its lead candidate for next year’s
European Parliament election, while vowing to challenge the EU from the inside
and turn it into a “fortress” against migrants.
More than
65 percent of the about 600 AfD delegates at a party gathering on Saturday in
Magdeburg, in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, voted for Krah as
their lead candidate for the European Parliament election, which will take
place June 6-9 next year.
“We are now
the most exciting right-wing party in all of Europe,” Krah said in his speech
in Magdeburg. He argued that the AfD — which advocates anti-migration, climate
change-denying, Russia-friendly and deeply Euroskeptic positions — would not
“adapt” to less radical stances in order to attract more voters or form
alliances, as other right-wing parties would allegedly do.
Krah, 46,
has been a lawmaker in the European Parliament since 2019, where he is a member
of the trade committee and the Delegation to the United States, as well as the
subcommittees on human rights and security and defense. Earlier this year, he
sparked controversy by a potential contract fraud: Although Krah denies the
allegations, the case was transferred to the European Public Prosecutor’s
Office (EPPO), which could bring criminal charges against him.
Delegates
at the party convention in Magdeburg also voted in favor of the AfD officially
joining the far-right and Euroskeptic Identity & Democracy group (ID) in
the European Parliament. Individual AfD MEPs like Krah are already members of
the ID, but by joining the group as an entire party the influence and funding
of the far right in parliament is poised to increase further.
“Joining
the ID group was a right and logical step,” Krah said, adding that he wanted
the group “to become so strong that in the next legislative period it will no
longer be possible to form such a cordon sanitaire against us, but that we will
have a say” in the assembly. He was referring to a decision by established
parties following the last European election in 2019 to set up an alliance to
ban far-right MEPs from being elected to decisive positions in Parliament.
Krah also
accused the EU of “over-regulating” domestic politics, but most of his comments
have been focused on national issues such as vowing to increase the income of
workers. He claimed that too much of workers’ taxes is spent “on climate, on
gender politics, on immigration” and on support for Ukraine in its defense
against Russia’s aggression.
The AfD has
in recent months risen significantly in German national polls, where it is now
at the second position at 20 percent, two percentage points ahead of Chancellor
Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and seven percentage points behind
Germany’s main center-right opposition party, the Christian Democratic Union
(CDU).
It is still
uncertain, however, whether the AfD will be able to maintain this all-time high
in voter support as it is currently benefiting from general discontent in
Germany over high energy prices, the inflation as well as the mediocre
performance of the government, which has spent much of past months with
infighting between Scholz’s SPD and its coalition partners, the Greens and the
business-friendly Free Democrats.
Yet AfD
co-party leader Alice Weidel struck an optimistic tone on Saturday, saying that
the party would “continue to improve” its results ahead of the European
elections and upcoming regional elections in the eastern German states of
Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia next year.
Switching
to European politics, Weidel said that her party wants to turn the EU into “a
fortress” against migrants “to protect our homeland, and we do that together
with our European partners.”
She accused
the EU of being “deeply undemocratic and overreaching,” and advocated for the
common far-right position that there should be “a Europe of fatherlands” and a
repatriation of EU competences to national politics “where the elected
representatives of the people sit in the parliaments.”
Her
remarks, which essentially undermine the competency and legitimacy of EU
lawmakers like the AfD’s lead candidate Krah, may sound involuntarily comical
but go along with the party’s contradictory line of seeking to broad support in
European elections while at the same time opposing the European Union.
The AfD’s
draft EU election program says that “our patience with the EU is exhausted,”
and adds that “we therefore seek the orderly dissolution of the EU and instead
want to establish a new European economic and interest community, a federation
of European nations.”
The party
leadership already announced that this paragraph will likely be softened in the
final election program, which is to be adopted at a later stage. Still, the
other AfD co-leader, Tino Chrupalla, said in Magdeburg that “there must be the
possibility of an exit, an orderly exit from the EU.”
The party
meeting will continue next weekend with the election of more candidates for the
European election.
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