Published 23 May 2024 at 07.09
Foreign. Marine Le Pen's National Rally party in France says it will no longer cooperate with Alternative for Germany in the European Parliament.
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– We will no longer to sit with them during the next mandate, says National Assembly campaign manager Alex Loubet about the AFD to Libération.
Relations between the French and German parties have deteriorated as Le Pen and her party have become increasingly liberal and politically correct. National Assembly reacted strongly earlier this year to a revelation in the German media that AFD politicians participated in a meeting where they discussed return migration – a solution to the multicultural problem which, according to Le Pen, is unthinkable.
What now caused the cup to overflow is a statement by AFD's MEP Maximilian Krah, who spoke to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica about the activities of the Waffen-SS during the Second World War.
In the interview, Krah says that the question of guilt in this case should be assessed on an individual basis. He notes that he would never say “that anyone who wore an SS uniform was automatically a criminal”.
– At the end of the war there were almost a million SS men. (The Nobel laureate in literature, ed. note) Günter Grass was also in the Waffen-SS, he tells the Italian newspaper.
– Many of the 900,000 SS men were farmers. A large percentage were probably war criminals, but not all, he adds.
In a post published on X on Tuesday, Maximilian Krah elaborated on his reasoning: “I don't like Günter Grass but don't consider him a criminal .”
The comments are said to have angered the leadership of the National Assembly, including Marine Le Pen.
National Assembly and AFD are currently part of the party group Identity and Democracy (ID) in the European Parliament. Even the Danish People's Party, which is also a member of the ID group, has distanced itself from Maximilian Krah's statements.
“If AFD does not take the situation seriously, and gets rid of Krah, DF believes that AFD should leave The ID group”, writes MEP Anders Vistisen on X.
Maximilian Krah announced on Wednesday that, following the criticism, he will not participate in campaign events during the election run. He is also resigning from the federal party board.
An alternative for the National Assembly in the EU Parliament could be the group European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), where the Sweden Democrats sit together with, among others, the Italian government party Italy's brothers, Polish Law and Justice and Spanish Vox.
Commenting to Remix News, Jacek Saryusz-Wolskis, long-time EU member for Law and Justice, says that the National Assembly “would be welcome in the ECR group”.< /p>