Maximilian Krah, the scandal-plagued lead candidate of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the EU election, will not be part of the AfD’s future delegation in the European Parliament.
At a meeting on Monday, the newly elected AfD MEPs voted in favor of a motion not to include Krah in their delegation, Krah himself told reporters.
“I was not voted in,” Krah told a group of reporters on Monday.
“I wish my newly elected fellow MEPs every success in their attempt to rejoin the ID group without me,” Krah said on X, referring to the Identity and Democracy group in the EU Parliament. “I think this is the wrong way to go and sends a devastating signal to our voters, especially our young voters.”
In May, the AfD was expelled from ID following a series of scandals that have damaged its popularity and made it something of a pariah.
The move came after Krah, the AfD’s lead candidate for the European election, told an Italian newspaper that members of the Nazi SS were not necessarily criminals.
Now, it appears the AfD wants to try to rejoin the ID group, which contains Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. Party leaders hope that ejecting Krah from their delegation will prompt Le Pen to reconsider.
Krah has been at the center of a series of scandals implicating the AfD. In April, German police arrested one of Krah’s parliamentary aides, alleging he spied for China. Shortly after that, German public prosecutors in the city of Dresden initiated preliminary investigations over allegations Krah had accepted payments from Russia and China.
On Monday morning, AfD co-chairs Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla met with the party’s newly elected MEPs in Berlin to form the party’s future delegation to the EU Parliament and appoint a leader for the group.
Despite the recent scandals, the AfD finished second in Germany’s EU election, projected to have won 15.9 percent of the vote.