Maximilian Krah was the Alternative for Germany’s lead candidate for European Parliament, and is one of the most controversial and charismatic personalities in German politics. The AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) took 16% of German votes in the June 9 election, more than any party in Germany’s present governing coalition, and is expected to poll first in three state elections in September. Born in 1977, Krah left the Christian Democrats in 2016 and was first elected to the European Parliament in 2019. He spoke to Asia Times Editor Uwe Parpart and Deputy Editor David Goldman on June 13. Below is a lightly edited transcript of their discussion.
Q: Maximilian Krah, that was a significant victory – an earthquake, even. It has set off and continues to set off shockwaves. How did it happen? Specifically, what did German voters, your voters, vote for and against?
A: The game changer was the young people. The youngsters made the difference. We saw a 12% increase among voters younger than 24.
The left allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to vote, thinking they would support leftist candidates. However, within that group, aged 16 to 24, we gained 12%. We are now the strongest political force among the under-24 demographic, with a total of 17%.
This is the game changer because it shows that the future is ours, provided we don’t make mistakes again. We could have done much better if we had adopted more of Donald Trump’s style. During the campaign, I was a victim of some intelligence attacks.
Unfortunately, my party decided to hide me for some weeks, limiting my campaign efforts to TikTok and the internet, focusing on young voters. The gain among young voters was substantial enough to overcome the losses among older voters.
So, the message from Germany is that young Germany is moving to the right wing. It’s a big win and brings hope.
The other message is that we must learn to handle such strong attacks, which were orchestrated by intelligence agencies.
Q: In May, you gave an interview to the Swiss magazine Weltwoche titled “Germany must be a power for peace.” Was the issue of peace particularly important to young voters and the electorate as a whole?
A: First of all, I think peace is the major issue for European politics in the next five years. Why? Because America will gradually withdraw from the Ukraine conflict.
Looking at the world map, we have three centers of conflict: Ukraine, the Middle East, and Taiwan. America alone cannot win a war in all three locations.
It is clear that the war in Ukraine must be supported by European money. The decision has to pass the European Parliament when it comes to new money for Ukraine, new weapons and funding military support. So, in European elections, we decide on the continuation of the war in Ukraine for the next few years.
Obviously, this is a global issue. This is why intelligence services from all over the world were so interested in and active in influencing this campaign. Among young voters, the questions are much more fundamental.
When you are a young person today, you know that the experiences your teachers and parents tell you won’t prepare you for the future. Young people don’t know what the future holds, and they aren’t even taught what it means to be human.
They doubt their gender identity – whether they are male, female or something else. We have a generation of young people who are insecure about themselves but know they face a future that will transform everything around them. Young people demand fundamental answers because they know that life ahead will challenge them, and they feel unprepared for that challenge.
And, of course, war is a fundamental and crucial issue because it concerns life and death. In war, you can die, so young people are very open to fundamental issues.
Q: Does the AfD have a vision of what peace would look like? Eventually, this war will end, as all wars do. What comes after it?
A: The AfD has faced challenges during the campaign because we anticipated attacks but didn’t know they would be so severe. Unfortunately, we weren’t prepared for the intensity of these attacks.
It’s hard to say if the AfD has a cohesive vision, but I can share my own vision. For a peace deal, everyone knows the basic idea.
We could take the current front line and establish it as the new border for the next five years. After that, hold a plebiscite in the Russian-occupied areas to determine if they want to belong to Russia or Ukraine. It’s highly probable that they would choose Russia.
However, the war in Ukraine is about more than Ukraine; it’s about the global world order. If Russia doesn’t lose completely and even gains compared with the status quo ante, the current Western-led global order ends. Thus, the West cannot accept such a peace deal.
The conversation is about prolonging the war, supplying more ammunition, more weapons, and trying to prevent Ukraine from losing. Any end to the war would signify the end of Western global dominance.
This is why the elites in Brussels and Washington DC are committed to continuing the war and preventing any peace initiative.
When I spoke to Weltwoche, I emphasized that Germany should be a “Macht für den Frieden” (a power for peace). But Germany today is not a power at all; it is more like a weasel. There is no independent German policy thinking. When Donald Trump was president, all of Brussels and Berlin called for strategic autonomy. When Joe Biden came back to lead the world, everyone was happy because the political elites lacked the intellectual capacity for independent foreign policy.
To understand European policies, just look to Washington, DC. The fight we face is to save Western global dominance, which means American global dominance.
My vision is for Germany to understand it is the loser in this war and seek support from other European countries for an independent foreign policy. Many smaller European countries, like Hungary and Bulgaria, understand this, and even the Netherlands. But as long as Germany is the front-runner in a policy that harms itself the most, there will be no change.
Q: Let’s say in a few years, the AfD holds the foreign ministry. You are the foreign minister with a mandate for an independent foreign policy. The old order is in ruins. What kind of new order would you like to bring about? What is your vision for what should replace the existing circumstances?
A: The vision is to accept that there are different understandings of a perfect order.
Let the Chinese be Chinese, the Indians be Indian, the Africans be African and the Europeans be European. We must abandon the idea that the whole world must follow the same political and legal culture. Asia has its traditions, and they should govern themselves accordingly. The same goes for the Islamic world. Let Muslims follow their own order without trying to impose Western values on them.
So, the first step is to accept that major regions in the world should govern themselves by their own ideas of political and legal order. Then, foreign policy should be based on mutual interests.
The problem today is that the West believes its values are universal and enforces them through military and economic sanctions. Instead, I propose that Asians follow Asian rules, Muslims follow Muslim rules and Africans follow African rules while we start diplomacy based on mutual interests.
This idea aligns with Carl Schmitt’s concept of Großraumordnung (large area order) rather than Immanuel Kant’s idea of a universal global order. I align with Schmitt’s perspective, not Kant’s.
Q: But let’s discuss how to get from here to there. The AfD has the voter strength of a mass party but still has the profile of a protest movement, an Aktionsgruppe. What will take the AfD from its present status as a perceived protest movement to a party that can govern or participate in governing Europe’s most powerful country?
A: The polls now tell a different story. People were asked why they voted for the AfD—was it because of the program or as a protest? Now, 55% say they vote for what we stand for. This shift is a significant success of mine.
I advocate an idea, a vision. I stand for a vision, not just opposition to the government. Maybe we could have gained even more support by campaigning solely against the government. But I said, “If you vote for me, you vote for a vision.” We need to accept that having a positive 16% in favor of something is better than 18% against something.
We must make it clear that there is an alternative in political thinking. The liberal era is ending. The Global South is rising, bringing traditional thinking back. We should rediscover our own Western traditional thinking.
Let’s advocate for a positive political vision instead of merely opposing the current system. This approach will gradually strengthen our position.
As we grow stronger, there will be an incentive for the Christian Democrats to find an agreement with us. In September, we have regional elections in three eastern German states—Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg. We will be the strongest force in all three states.
The Christian Democrats can either join with us to form a government or align with the Greens and Socialists to form a left-wing government. If a conservative liberal has to choose between partnering with leftists or with us, their first choice would be us. However, the national party leadership currently prevents them from doing so.
I hope that eventually the Christian Democrats in eastern Germany will stop following their national party leadership and choose to collaborate with us. This is our path to power: the Christian Democrats facing internal trouble and their eastern branches seeking agreements with us.
Q: Looking at the results of the June 9 elections, the AfD is the dominant party in these three states, especially in Saxony. If things continue this way, you might be able to form a government with a smaller party as early as September. You might not even need the CDU. The left-nationalist party of Ms Wagenknecht, Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, also made significant gains. Do you see the possibility of forming a government in Saxony or Thuringia with the BSW, despite some differences?
A: This is the crucial question. I would love to see that. However, while Ms Wagenknecht is at the top of her party, her regional colleagues are still very much socialist in a negative way.
Wagenknecht comes from a traditional Marxist school, the old East Germans; she combines a very classical Marxist education in philosophy with a PhD in economics.
There are a lot of issues on which we agree. She understands economics, which sets her apart from the other socialists, and opposes woke ideologies.
But she isn’t alone. Her local staff are of lower quality, and less forward-looking than she is. We don’t even know who are the key people in the Wagenknecht party in Saxony.
Unfortunately, Ms Wagenknecht has already made an offer to the Christian Democrats, which suggests that she is applying for membership in the establishment. In Thuringia, though, the Christian Democrats won’t have enough votes to form a coalition with Wagenknecht. So Thuringia will become the laboratory of German politics. It’s likely we will have more success collaborating with disillusioned CDU voters in East Germany than with the Wagenknecht party.
Q: What about the the Social Democratic Party? We are seeing something of a rebellion among the SPD against Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his Green coalition partners. SPD leaders from the east have suggested collaborating with the AfD. Is there any chance of that happening?
A: No, I don’t see that happening. The SPD has become too much of an ideological party. Traditionally, the Social Democrats were for the working class and social justice, with values of family and tradition. The SPD has long since left that behind. They became a party of ideological projects – climate change, energy transformation, feminism, and LGBTQ+ issues. They have lost touch with traditional social democratic values. The SPD will not be our partner. Our path to power will be through the CDU or forming our own government.
Q: In the English language press, this is portrayed as a European move to the right in European Parliament elections. To what extent do you see a European trend? And to what extent is this something specifically German?
A: The problem is that the European right is divided. We have a move to the right. The strongest single group we have in the European election in the European Parliament now is the French Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen. We agree with them, as long as you talk about migration, the cultural war, the stifling socialist bureaucracy, this climate nonsense, etc.
But the most important question is foreign policy. And unfortunately, the European right is completely divided. You have a part of the European right, which in my view is the majority, that has a Cold War thinking, which has more to do with the 1980s than with 2024. So for them, international politics is not about the shift of power from the Atlantic to the Global South, etc. They still believe in the old rhetoric of war between the free world against the world of darkness. They are deep state agents when it comes to foreign policy, even more sometimes than the Socialists.
We have a move to the right when it comes to questions of migration, etc, etc. But the front lines are completely different when it comes to foreign and global policy. And there we don’t have a shift to the right. Unfortunately.
Q: The United States likes to frame the global situation as a contest between the US and China. And the way many in the US look at Europe right now is that Europe has to make up its mind. Does Europe have to make that kind of a choice between America and China?
A: It seems to be a rather absurd proposition. I don’t think it’s a choice between America and China. And if there is only a choice between America and China, I would prefer America. The question is, do we have a choice between America and being more or less independent?
In the case of Germany, our economic model was based on getting cheap energy from Russia, using this energy to produce manufactured goods, and exporting them to the whole world, including China.
Now, in the brave new world that we find ourselves in, thanks to our American friends, we don’t get cheap energy from Russia anymore, because our pipelines were destroyed. So the prices of our manufactured goods are increasing, and they no longer are competitive. And we are not allowed to export to wherever we want, because of a global sanctions regime designed by the United States.
That means as a matter of economic necessity, we need to get back on good terms with the Russians, that we can import energy. And of course, we need open trade, because Germany is based on the manufacturing industry, and we produce more goods than we can use ourselves.
What we see today is the complete destruction of the German economy and the German manufacturing industry because of this new foreign policy approach of America. And I’m not willing to accept that.
The whole Western or American empire is in decline. The decline of Western dominance or American dominance is not a matter of five years. It is a process with periods in which this decline is visible and quite rapid. And there will be times in which there’s a counter-strike, and American and Western power will increase for a short period. But in the long run, I’m convinced that the world of the future is a world of multipolarity, which is not run by Washington, DC, and Brussels anymore. The demographic and economic data are clear.
In 1913, one-third of the global population lived in Western Europe and North America. Now, it’s just one-sixth. And the age pyramid in the Western world is horrible. The same is true of global GDP. When I was born in the mid-1970s, almost three-quarters of the global GDP was produced in the G7 countries. Now, we are on the same level as the BRICS. We only dominate in terms of military power. But as Talleyrand said, you can’t sit on bayonets.
Q: What would you expect from a second Trump presidency?
A: When we look back at the first Trump presidency, when it came to foreign policy, it was quite ambiguous. Trump did a lot of good things, ending the endless wars. But on the other hand, of course, Trump is an American president. And his big idea is America first. He also wants to save American international and global power, which is, of course, his duty as an American president.
Trump wants to reshape American global power. Trump will not be able to make everything reverse what happened during the Biden presidency. There is a long-term trend of decline of American global power. But you will see periods in which American global power is declining more quickly and some years of a reverse process. And I think that during a Trump presidency we will see that, in an overall perspective, American global power will increase.
Q: Look into Germany’s economic future, as you described the problems before. China, in the past four years, has more or less doubled its exports to the Global South. Is there much thinking in Germany about Germany’s future in the Global South and how to adapt to a world where the Global South is a major contributor to growth?
A: No, there is no thinking at all in Germany. It would even be flattering to describe our political elite as mediocre. I truly believe that the biggest fear of our political elite is the state of the climate in 100 years. And when it comes to foreign policy, and especially trade policy, they don’t question what it means for German GDP. They are driven by the idea that they have to serve a kind of global moral imperative.
The country is in the hands of idiots, of people with no understanding of economic development. We are not just bystanders when our industry gets ruined. We spend money to destroy our export industry. There is no understanding at all of the changes in the world and the competition with China.
The German elites follow phantom debates, which are focused on climate, on moral issues, on human rights – but are not focused on economic growth, on our share of international trade, on our influence in economic relations.
Q: Despite charges that have come from the left-wing press regarding alleged temporizing about the Nazi period we do observe, simply from reading websites in the press, that the most pro-Israel party in Germany is without doubt the AfD. And I was wondering if you could elaborate on that a bit, on the AfD’s attitude towards Israel and what that means for the AfD.
A: I mean, first of all, what is the accusation against me? I know you know that during World War II there was a kind of a second army. There was the official German army, the Wehrmacht. And then there was a second army, which was the Waffen-SS, which at the end had 900,000 soldiers. And of course, this clearly was a Nazi army. This was not a transformed traditional army. This was a newly built Nazi army.
But you also had 16- and 17-year-old people who were conscripted into this Nazi army, and they had to fight with their rifles and their tanks. And I was asked whether I would think that everyone who was in this second army was a criminal. And I said no. I think there was a high percentage who committed war crimes. But once again, even in that case, you have to look for individual guilt and you have to make personal claims.
This is, by the way, what even the Allied forces did after World War II. They always looked at whether there was an individual crime or not, but they never punished people just for being a member of the second army.
Unfortunately, the awareness of historical facts and the understanding of basic concepts of guilt and crime is, meanwhile, so low in Germany that what I said was completely misunderstood and misinterpreted. Now you can say it would have been better if I had not answered the question, or you could say I should start to inform people more and more.
When it comes to Israel, it’s quite clear that we are the only party to understand that Israel is a project that is culturally European, so that this country in some way belongs to us Europeans, because of its culture, its history, and our collective belonging to each other.
But when you are a fierce liberal, then there is no such thing as culture or history. Then there is only the individual and mankind. And the only thing you consider is individual human rights. And if you try to understand politics and history only through the lens of individual human rights, you usually will come to the wrong results.
I feel a lot of sympathy for and solidarity with Israel. When you have this approach, you will never arrive at an anti-Israeli stance. Nonetheless, I also have the privilege from time to time to criticize Israeli politics, because I don’t want to have these two million inhabitants of Gaza in Europe.
Q: One thing that struck us is that the AfD leader, Alice Weidel, said, “We are the Arbeiterpartei, the party of the workers.” And that may be a bit of a stretch, but it is in fact the case that the AFD in these last elections appealed almost to the same extent to what the good old Marxists called the working class. What is your thinking?
A: The AfD issued its basic manifesto in 2015, almost 10 years ago, and the world has changed tremendously. For me personally, the time to talk only about redistribution of wealth is over. We have to talk about how to create wealth. And now I am comfortable with our self-description as a workers’ party.
The problem in Germany is that one-third of the GDP is redistributed. It’s a huge socialist machine that takes money from the economy and gives the money mostly to immigrants. That’s a big magnet for immigration.
I feel a lot of compassion for people who work hard and have almost nothing at the end of the month. After-tax wages in Germany are shamefully low. But I think that the way to increase the living standard of the middle class is not to increase redistribution, but to reduce redistribution. They should keep more of what they earn, and that means less in taxes and less in deductions for the social security system.
In my mind, to be the advocate of the middle class, of the ordinary people, of the single mom who works in a grocery store as a cashier, is not to increase redistribution and follow a socialist agenda but to keep more of their income in their pocket.
My approach is more market economy, but a market economy that serves the single mom who works in a grocery store as a cashier rather than serving Goldman Sachs – a market economy for the middle class, for the small and mid-size businesses, instead of a market economy for the global conglomerates.