Maximilian Krah

Krah in 2016

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Maximilian Krah (1977–) is a German far-right politician and former lawyer. He is the AfD's top candidate for the 2024 European elections despite having connections with Chinese and Russian spies and having trivialized the atrocities of the Waffen-SS. He was ultimately banned from campaigning due to these scandals.

Biography

Krah was born in Upper Lusatia, but grew up in Dresden, where he also received his law degree. Like many other AfD politicians and his father, he was a CDU member before taking a hard right turn. Since 2008, Krah managed parts of the finances of the antisemitic and archconservative Society of St. Pius X. He is also known for representing far-right clients and people balancing on the limits of free speech, for example:

• The chairman of a local homeless aid association who publicly wished "death and nothing else" upon the head of the Dresden food bank who did not want to cooperate with them due to the xenophobia and PEGIDA ties of some members
• AfD MdB Jens Maier who racially insulted the son of tennis player Boris Becker
• An ex-CDU (now AfD) local councillor and three other men who tied a mentally ill refugee with cable ties to a tree
• The notorious "Hutbürger", an off-duty cop who tried to stop reporters from filming a PEGIDA demonstration in heavy Saxonian accent, considered to be a) extremely funny and b) an attack on press freedom
• Richard Williamson, sectarian St. Pius X society bishop by day, Holocaust denier and antisemite by night.
• Susanne Dagen, a book seller who got kicked out of a workshop about far-right networks hosted by a museum because she herself had ties to the New Right, which was making other participants feel uncomfortable.

Krah was elected into the European Parliament in the 2019 election for the AFD. In 2022, he was suspended from the Identity and Democracy faction for half a year, because he chose to support the even crazier Éric Zemmour rather than Marine Le Pen. He put himself up to election as the mayor of Dresden in 2022, but ultimately failed with only 12% of the votes in the second round. Krah was chosen as the AfD's top candidate for the upcoming European election in 2024.

Positions

“”But you are the majority for whom we make politics. When I look around, it is not colorful nor diverse, that's the beauty of Freital. You're all German, Saxon, white. Original in German: Aber Sie sind die Mehrheit, für die wir Politik machen. Wenn ich hier in den Raum schaue, ist es nicht bunt und vielfältig, das ist das Schöne an Freital. Sie alle sind deutsch, sächsisch, weiß.

—Krah at a rally in 2019

Krah is considered hardline right even for the AfD. The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, Germany's federal domestic intelligence service, classifies his statements as ethnic nationalist, islamophobic, xenophobic and directed against the constitution. In one of the many TikTok videos that he posted, he called for more pride in one's ancestors, referring to the generation of grand-parents and grand-grand-parents that managed to start a World War and murdered millions, really not something one should be proud of. Krah denied that his grandfather was an NSDAP member, despite investigations showing that his grandfather was an avid supporter. In his Tweets, he sometimes referred to the worldview of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, even directly plagiarizing him once. Like other far-right extremists, Krah appropriated the term "Umvolkung" (literally "change of the people") straight from the vocabulary of the original Nazis to propagate the conspiracy theory that Muslim immigrants are exploiting the tolerance of the left to colonialize Europe. However, this does not keep him from trying to appeal to young voters of Turkish origin and praising the Taliban for invading Kabul during Pride month. Even though he is no fan of the European Union, he does not want a "Dexit" like some of his fellow party members, rather wanting the far-right to try to gain power inside the system and then alter it to their will.

Krah's positions are so extreme that they even helped repel Marine Le Pen and other members of National Rally (RN) away from the entire AfD party. In May 2024, Krah defended the Waffen-SS (the main paramilitary force of Adolf Hitler's Nazi party and a leading part of the Holocaust) in an interview, proclaiming that the SS "were not all criminals" and that many SS members were "simple farmers who didn’t have another choice". This was the last straw for many RN members — even they felt that these remarks trivialized the Nazi era and its numerous atrocities. As a result, the RN announced that they would no longer align with AfD in the European Parliament. Due to the fallout from this interview, Krah stepped back from his 2024 European Parliament campaign and resigned from the senior leadership team of AfD.

Friends all around the world

No hatred to see here, please go on.

Contrasting the stance of many other far-right European parties, Krah seems to think that the greatest danger to Germany stems not from the Islamic world, but rather from the "woke West", i.e. the USA, joining a flourishing tradition of anti-Americanism and Russophile attitude in the German right-wing landscape. In 2024, messages between Krah and his close friend, the pro-Russian Ukrainian politician Oleh Voloschyn, surfaced. Voloschyn assured Krah that "we settled the issue of our compensation for your technical expenditures. From May on it will be as it used to be before February." Voloshyn is sanctioned by the USA and accused of state treason by Ukraine, which made Krah the target of an FBI investigation. Krahs former assistant, Guillaume Pradoura, was a commited admirer of Vladimir Putin and organized interview partners for the right-wing online platform and Russian psyop Voice of Europe. Voice of Europe is suspected of bribing both Krah and his fellow party member Petr Byrson. Krah also gave Janusz Niedźwiecki, a suspected Russian spy, a permanent access authorisation to the European parliament.

Krah is suspiciously reluctant to vote against Chinese interest in the European Parliament, even when other party colleagues are doing otherwise, and promotes stronger economic ties between China and Germany while dismissing the Uyghur genocide as anti-Chinese propaganda. This might be connected to one of his assistants, a Chinese expatriate, who was spying on Chinese opposition members and repeatedly passed on secret information from the European Parliament to China. Krah also undertook several trips to China that were paid for by a state-owned company. In these trips, he established contacts to the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (IDCPC), according to the German domestic intelligence agency (Verfassungsschutz), IDCPC is a de-facto part of the Chinese secret service aiming to gather valuable political information and influence politicians abroad.

Antisemitism? Where?

In 2019, a photo of Guillaume Pradoura, assistant of the Rassemblement National general secretary was published by an ex-RN member. Pradoura posed as the classic caricature of the menacing orthodox Jew, complete with long locks and black hat. Because of this textbook example of antisemitism, his party expelled him. Shortly after this, Krah appointed him as an assistant, apparently neither deterred by the ongoing scandal nor by Pradoura being a co-founder of the Identitarian Movement or his close friendship with a violent skinhead and literal KKK member. When confronted with the image, Krah called it a "carnival gag", allegedly having been shot at a screening of Louis de Funes cult classic The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob, and denied the underlying antisemitim. Soon after, Pradoura stopped working for Krah for unknown reasons. Nevertheless, he is still active in EU politics, now working as an assistant for the Dutch MEP Marcel de Graaff.

Krah also has claimed that George Soros wants to destroy humanity.