After another embarrassing exit from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, with which it previously sat within the Identity and Democracy (ID) group in the European Parliament, the National Rally (RN) informed Le Monde on Tuesday May 21, that he will no longer sit with the German party within ID after the European elections of June 9, confirming information from Libération.
A decision which follows the remarks of the head of the German far-right party list, Maximilian Krah, who affirmed that an “SS was not automatically a criminal”, in an interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica, Saturday May 18. “Among the 900,000 SS, (…) there was certainly a high percentage of criminals, but they were not all,” declared the German MEP in particular.
Jordan Bardella, president of the RN and head of the list for the European elections, has “made the decision to no longer sit” with the AfD MEPs in the European Parliament, his campaign director declared shortly after to Agence France-Presse , Alexandre Loubet. “We had frank discussions, the lessons were not learned: we are drawing the consequences,” he explained, in reference to the countless controversies sparked by this German partner, as cumbersome as it seemed essential for maintain the ID group, in which the two formations sat until then.
Project for large-scale expulsion of foreigners
For several months, Marine Le Pen and her team have been struggling with the controversies that punctuate the campaign of their partner across the Rhine. On January 10, the German investigative site Correctiv revealed the holding of a secret meeting on November 25, 2023 in Potsdam, where party executives met with representatives of the neo-Nazi movement to discuss a project large-scale expulsion of foreigners and Germans of foreign origin.
Suspected of having illegally received money from Russian and Chinese sources, Maximilian Krah has also been the subject, since April, of two investigations opened by the German federal prosecutor’s office for suspicion of Russian and Chinese financing.
Just last week, Björn Höcke, one of the figures of the populist and anti-migrant German party created in 2013, was fined 13,000 euros for using a Nazi slogan. In the past, he had already called the Holocaust monument in Berlin a “memorial of shame” and called for a “180-degree change” in the culture of remembrance in the country, which had led the intelligence services Germans monitor the AfD. Having found the explanations it had requested from its partner unsatisfactory, the RN declared that it would make a final decision on this partnership after the European election.
In his interview with La Repubblica, far from fearing the consequences that Marine Le Pen and her party could draw from her new declarations, Mr. Krah challenged his French ally, with whom he assures that he has no “relations”: “ If we are expelled [from the ID group], I doubt they will reach the number of seven countries required to form a group. »
On behalf of her party, Marine Le Pen also went last weekend to a major meeting organized by the Spanish nationalist party Vox, member of the European Conservatives and Reformists (CRE) group of the European Parliament, alongside other far-right leaders including Viktor Orban, Giorgia Meloni, Javier Milei and even pro-Trump Americans, with a view to “a global alliance between patriots”.
