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Germany’s AfD party has gone too far, even for Europe’s far-right coalition

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’t 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.

“Before 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,” Krah told La Repubblica last weekend.

The AfD have since banned the 47-year-old Krah, their leading candidate in next month’s European elections, from making public appearances. Experts say his remarks have also caused reverberations across Europe’s far-right, shining a light on how the continent’s far-right parties view themselves and their associations.

After Krah’s interview was published on Saturday, his party suspended him on Wednesday, and said that he had taken ”full responsibility” for his actions and agreed to step down from its federal executive board with immediate effect.

In a scathing statement, the AfD accused Krah of having caused “massive damage to the party in the current election campaign, for which the candidate had provided the pretext.”

It is not immediately clear if Krah remains the AfD’s official lead candidate for the upcoming European election.

Lorenz Blumenthaler, a political analyst at the Amadeu Antonio Foundation in Berlin – which runs educational projects and researches right-wing extremism, racism and antisemitism – told CNN that the AfD only takes action like this in certain circumstances.

“The only time when there exists this red line is when they feel like it’s hurting their voting result. And that’s 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.”

Blumenthaler added that reprimanding Krah this close to a major election is a pretty drastic step politically. It “delegitimizes you as a political party and hurts you much more than just running with a lazy dog (or deadweight candidate),” he told CNN.

The Identity and Democracy (ID) bloc said in a statement, they had decided to exclude the AfD, “with immediate effect,” adding that “the ID Group no longer wants to be associated with the incidents involving Maximilian Krah, head of the AfD list for the European elections.”

In Paris, the leaders of French right-wing party National Rally (RN) – the successor to the Front National led by Marine Le Pen, and part of the ID alliance – also dissociated themselves from the AfD.

RN President Jordan Bardella said in a French TV debate on Tuesday that the AfD had “crossed red lines.”

“We will have new allies after the European elections and will no longer be in the same group as the AfD,” Bardella added.

Joe Düker, a researcher at the extremism monitoring think tank the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (CeMAS), told CNN that European far-right parties, and RN in particular, have been trying to present themselves as more moderate.

“Far-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’s 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.”

Blumenthaler described this image cleansing as the “most absurd dynamic that we have, a new far-right self-consciousness all over Europe.”

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