Recently, a German report from the news site T-Online exposed a politician in the Maximilian Krah as holding vast ties to a Chinese influence network. Maximilian Krah is a German lawyer and self-described right-wing politician. He is a member of the European Parliament for Alternative for Germany. Krah is the AfD’s leading candidate in next year’s European Parliament elections. He is driving on the party’s Euroskeptic, anti-immigration, and nationalist platform. He is also a longtime defender of China. He is one of those members who voted against the EU resolution on the situation of the Uyghurs in China.
According to the information, several people working closely with Krah acquired funding from China. His longtime assistant seems to have connections to both Chinese dissenting groups in Germany and Beijing—which seems sceptically like an attempt to penetrate and report on those movements. Krah rejects the report, saying it is “without any proof,” it seems doubtful to affect his support base. Maximilian Krah also served as vice president of the China-EU Friendship group.
Krah is hardly the only AfD leader with connections to China, with several other party politicians touring the country last year at Beijing’s invitation. The far-right party has placed itself in opposition to Germany’s turn against China, which has come in reaction to state-sponsored horrors in Xinjiang and Chinese support for Russia during the war in Ukraine. Negative opinion toward China is also on the rise among the German public.
Once, Maximilian was asked about the Chinese President Xi Jinping and European Council President Charles Michel’s phone conversation. He said, “It is always positive news when politicians talk with each other instead of talking about each other. China is the EU´s largest trade partner, it should be the most common thing to have contacts. Seeing such a talk as something special shows that we are in an abnormal situation. I hope this talk is a first step to returning to normality in our relations with China.”
Moreover, further said, “ The West uses human rights as a political tool. It only attacks countries with which it is in conflict and competition. For example, We criticise Russia for the imprisonment of Alexei Navalny, a case for which I can give you good arguments in defence of Russia. But no one is talking about the arrest of Viktor Medvedchuk, who is an elected Member of the Ukrainian Parliament and officially persecuted for political reasons by a President who is listed in the Pandora Papers. But the West fully finances the Ukrainian regime, and it is needed in its conflict with Russia. Thus, neither political persecution nor corruption matters.”
