Berlin, April 25, 2024 (AFP)
German far-right politician Maximilian Krah, who is being investigated for suspicious links to Russia and China, is an avid user of TikTok who has long raised eyebrows over his dealings with foreign powers.
The 47-year-old, the AfD's top candidate for June's EU elections, is at the centre of a deepening crisis after one of his aides in the European Parliament was arrested on suspicion of spying for China.
German prosecutors have also revealed they have launched a preliminary investigation against Krah himself over reports of suspicious payments received from China and Russia.
Krah cuts a distinctive figure and grabs attention with his outspoken views.
He has spoken of "repopulation" -- a reference to a right-wing view that immigrants are replacing natives -- and has been quoted several times in reports by German intelligence services surveying the AfD for evidence of far-right extremism.
Krah is one of Germany's most active politicians on TikTok, where he has more than 42,000 followers.
A widower with eight children from three partners, he went viral on the network last year with a clip in which he shared dating advice for young men, claiming: "Real men are right-wing" -- a slogan that has become his trademark.
- 'Vassal of China' -
Born in the eastern state of Saxony near the Czech border in 1977, Krah grew up in communist East Germany, studying first in Dresden after the fall of the Berlin Wall before heading to New York for an MBA.
He joined the AfD in 2016 after defecting from the conservative CDU and became a member of the European Parliament in May 2019.
Even before this week's revelations, Krah had raised suspicions several times over his links to Russia and China.
Reinhard Buetikofer, a member of the European Parliament for the German Greens, told Deutschlandfunk radio this week that Krah had been the "loudest vassal of China" in the institution for some time.
In October, the t-online news website reported that a "close confidant" of Krah was running a German-Chinese lobbying network directly from his European Parliament office.
Money flowed from China to the confidant via the network, t-online said, and there were indications of links to the Chinese state.
According to German media reports, Krah first spent time in Hong Kong and Shanghai as a student and has visited several times since, saying he has "friends in China".
In a recent YouTube interview, Krah said his hotel accommodation and meals had been paid for by Huawei and other Chinese organisations during a trip to China in 2019.
"We're talking about a train ticket and two or three hotels and a meal," he said. "So what?... Of course I paid for the flight myself."
- 'Woke West' -
More recently, Krah and another AfD candidate for the EU elections, Petr Bystron, have been forced to deny allegations they accepted money to spread pro-Russian positions on a Moscow-financed news website.
Krah said he had twice appeared on the "Voice of Europe" website but had "of course not received any money for this".
According to Germany's Der Spiegel magazine, Krah was questioned by the FBI in December over possible payments from pro-Kremlin sources.
Krah has openly called for more friendly relations with Russia and China, including in his 2023 book "Politics from the Right: A Manifesto".
In the book, he writes that countries like China, Russia, India and African nations are "ultimately acting defensively against the universal claim to power of the woke West", according to German media.
In a 2022 interview with China's state-run Global Times, he said Europe should be "open for constructive dialogue with everyone" over the war in Ukraine.
He also argued that Germany decoupling from China would "serve only the interests of America".
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Sumber : AFP