Allegations of spying for China deepen German far right’s woes
Germany’s far-right AfD fought on Wednesday to draw a line under Chinese spying allegations, the latest in a slew of scandals to hit the anti-immigration party in a key election year.
An aide to Maximilian Krah, a member of the European Parliament for the AfD and the party’s top candidate for June’s EU elections, was arrested on Monday on suspicion of spying for China.
The AfD’s leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla summoned Mr. Krah to an emergency meeting in Berlin on Wednesday morning.
The controversial politician will not attend a key event this weekend to o¦cially launch the party’s EU vote race “so as not to damage the election campaign and the standing of the party”, they said after the talks.
But Mr. Krah himself said he would “remain the leading candidate” in the vote.
German media reported that the party will remove Mr. Krah from campaign posters and videos, while keeping him on its list of candidates.
An AfD spokesman declined to comment on the reports when contacted.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz called the allegations “very worrying”, without commenting on the case in detail.
After riding high in opinion polls at the end of last year, the AfD has since seen its support hammered by a series of scandals.
‘Descending into chaos’
The spying claims come on top of other recent allegations that Mr. Krah has links to Russia, piling pressure on the party seven weeks before the EU elections and ahead of key regional polls in Germany in September.
Towards the end of 2023, the AfD was polling at around 22% ahead of Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) and second only to the main Opposition conservatives. But one survey this week put it on 16%.
In January, an investigation by media group Correctiv indicated members of the AfD had discussed the idea of mass deportations at a meeting with extremists, leading to a wave of protests across the country.
More recently, Mr. Krah and another AfD candidate for the EU elections, Petr Bystron, have been forced to deny allegations they accepted money to spread pro-Russian positions on a Moscow-nanced news website. And Bjoern Hoecke, one of the AfD’s most controversial politicians and the head of the party in Thuringia state, is currently on trial in Germany for publicly using a banned Nazi slogan.
Dirk Wiese, a senior politician for the SPD, told the Rheinische Post newspaper the AfD was “descending into chaos”.
“First the allegations of sleazy money payments from the Kremlin, now suspected espionage for China... What’s next, North Korea?” he said.
The AfD’s parliamentary group chief Bernd Baumann slammed the China spying claims as “politically motivated” and put them down to “dirty” electioneering.