The far-right Alternative for Germany has long presented itself as the most patriotic force in German politics. But with the party now mired in allegations of foreign espionage, its critics say the claim has never seemed less credible.
German police arrested an employee of AfD MEP Maximilian Krah last week on charges of spying for China. Krah fired the aide but insisted he had done nothing wrong.
Earlier this month, AfD lawmaker Petr Bystron was questioned about allegations that he accepted money from a pro-Kremlin oligarch who ran a covert campaign to spread Russian disinformation in Europe. He has denied any wrongdoing.
The impact on the party’s popularity was clear. Earlier this year it was up to 24 percent in polls, putting it ahead of all three parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition, amid voter anger over rising immigration, inflation and infighting in government. According to a current Forsa survey, it has now fallen to just 16 percent.
Johannes Hillje, political consultant and expert on right-wing populism, said that the AfD’s self-image as a party of patriots had been “dealt with a serious blow.” “They have been exposed as a sort of Trojan horse of foreign interests, and it doesn’t get more unpatriotic than that,” he said.
The AfD has rejected claims that it is infiltrated by foreign spy services and its leaders have backed Krah and Bystron, its two leading candidates for European Parliament elections in June.
However, Krah was also excluded from the campaign launch event on Saturday and declared that he would not appear on posters or videos in the run-up to the election.
The scandals have been a gift to the AfD’s rivals, who are desperate to scale back ahead of the European vote and crucial fall elections in three eastern states where the party is expected to make strong gains.
“You don’t love your own country, but dictatorships like China, Russia and Belarus,” Dirk Wiese, a Social Democratic lawmaker, said in the Bundestag last week, mocking the AfD faction. “What’s next – North Korea?”
Even people within the AfD are speaking out. Nicolaus Fest, an AfD MEP who will step down in the next election, said in a video message that he could no longer support “such an unpatriotic, semi-socialist clan network, which acts as Moscow’s fifth column and gives nothing away.” “Damn um the law and liberal freedoms”.
AfD supporters reject the criticism as a targeted smear campaign. “We should stick together and not get involved in their provocations,” said Florian Russ, AfD youth activist in Saxony-Anhalt. “It’s all just an election campaign anyway.”
Experts say this attitude is typical of “hardcore” fans who view any criticism of the AfD as a “deep state” conspiracy. But the latest revelations could undermine the party’s appeal among less committed protest voters who, while angry at the Scholz government, have no strong ties to the AfD’s radical populism.
“Now these people will say: ‘Look how strange these AfD people are, I can’t reconcile voting for them with my conscience,'” said a former senior AfD official who has since left the party .
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This view is supported by survey data. In a survey last week, 75 percent of respondents described Russian and Chinese influence operations and espionage as a “major threat” to Germany. Among AfD voters, the proportion fell to 29 percent – but remained a significant proportion.
The spy stories are just the latest setback for the AfD. It was hit hard in January when it emerged that some of its lawmakers and officials had met with white supremacists to discuss plans to deport millions of people of foreign origin from Germany – including people with German passports.
Following the meeting, hundreds of thousands of Germans took to the streets to demonstrate against the extreme right. “This destroyed the myth that the AfD is the voice of the silent majority,” said Hillje.
Observers say the allegations against Bystron are unlikely to deter potential AfD voters. He and others in the party made no secret of their sympathy for Russia and denied hidden motives such as taking money from the Kremlin.
In March, three regional AfD MPs traveled to Russia as election observers and later praised the “unprecedented transparency” in the Russian electoral process. AfD leaders have repeatedly called for the lifting of economic sanctions against Moscow, and co-leader Tino Chrupalla famously attended a victory celebration at the Russian embassy in Berlin last May, just over a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But the Krah scandal is potentially more damaging, not only because AfD voters tend to be vehemently anti-communist, but also because it sheds an unflattering light on decisions made at the party’s highest levels of leadership.
The AfD chose Krah to the top of its European list despite frequent warnings about his unsuitability. These included two suspensions of the right-wing “Identity and Democracy” faction, one of them in connection with suspected fraud. He was also sharply criticized for an unusual video in which he congratulated China on the 70th anniversary of the occupation of Tibet. (The message has since been deleted.)
European Parliament colleagues noted his eccentric voting behavior in Brussels, where he regularly opposed parliamentary resolutions critical of Beijing and defended Chinese tech giant Huawei. “We always saw him as a lobbyist for Chinese interests,” said an AfD MEP.
In an interview with ZDF television on Sunday, Jörg Meuthen, AfD leader from 2015-22, said that admitting Krah as Europe’s top candidate would amount to a “leadership failure” by the current party leaders Chrupalla and Alice Weidel, who supported him despite all warnings.
But it is also typical of the “siege mentality” that prevails in the AfD, he added. “It’s almost like a cult, they circle around, stick together for better or worse and perceive any criticism from outside as malicious and hostile,” said Meuthen.