The AfD wants to go into the 2024 European election campaign with the top candidate Maximilian Krah and build a “Fortress Europe” together with other parties. We need this “to protect our homeland, and we do that together with our European partners,” said co-party leader Alice Weidel at the European election meeting of right-wing populists in Magdeburg.
The Saxon MEP Maximilian Krah, among others, is supposed to realize this. The 46-year-old was voted first on the list with 65.7 percent approval. “We are now the most exciting right-wing party in all of Europe,” said Krah in his application speech. The largely unknown Andreas Otti from Berlin competed against him. He received 25.2 percent of the votes. Overall, there were 9.1 percent no votes.
Krah’s candidacy was not without controversy
Krah’s candidacy was not without controversy in the party, and there was repeated trouble in the EU Parliament because of him. The right-wing parliamentary group Identity and Democracy (ID) had suspended him for three months at the beginning of the year. It was about the allegation that Krah should have manipulated the award of a PR contract for the parliamentary group.
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His membership in the group had already been suspended for several months in 2022. At the time, he was accused of not supporting Marine Le Pen of the Rassemblement National party in the French presidential campaign, but publicly supporting the party of right-wing extremist Éric Zemmour.
Krah accused his opponents within the party of waging an anonymous smear campaign against him for months. The lawyer has been a member of the European Parliament since 2019. Until 2016 he was a member of the CDU.
At the weekend, around 600 delegates want to fill further places on the list. Party circles said there could be up to 150 applications. Federal board member Mariana Harder-Kühnel said the aim was to choose at least 30 candidates.
AfD party conference: assembly with interruption
Contrary to the original planning, the first step was to nominate the candidates for the European elections. The election program should only be decided afterwards. It is expected that the election of the candidates will take place over several days. The meeting will be suspended on Sunday and then resumed next Friday.
The day before, at a federal party conference in a debate on the AfD delegation’s accession to the European party “Identity and Democracy”, Weidel had helped ensure that an application by supporters of Germany’s exit from the European Union was rejected. On Saturday she said that the EU was deeply undemocratic and encroaching, that it was interfering with private life and business structuring.
On the fringes of the meeting, the Thuringian AfD chairman Björn Höcke called for the abolition of the European Union in its current form. “There are many reasons to reject the EU, it doesn’t bring Europe any further,” said the politician, who was described as a right-wing extremist by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, in the phoenix interview. “This EU must die so that the true Europe can live.” Höcke advocated a new European confederation of states.
The alliance “Solidarisches Magdeburg” protested against the meeting. A demonstration with several hundred participants formed on Saturday in the Saxony-Anhalt state capital. (dpa)
2023-07-29 13:48:04
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