The head of the list for the European elections of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), Maximilian Krah, announced this Tuesday that he is leaving the leadership of the party and that he will refrain from participating further in the campaign, after stating that in the Nazi SS organization “not everyone was criminal”. In a recent interview with the Italian newspaper ‘La Repubblica’, Krah stated that It was a “mistake” to say that all members of the SS were “criminals.”

The controversy generated by those words has led to Krah giving an account through his law office of his decision to distance himself from the leadership of the party and to refrain from participating further in the electoral campaign. “I will refrain from new appearances in the electoral campaign effective immediately and I will resign as a member of the federal executive committee,” Krah said in a letter reported in the German press on Tuesday.

After Krah’s statements to ‘La Repubblica’ were made public, the far-right parties, the French National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen and the League of Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, they distanced themselves from AfD.

Those formations They will not again form a parliamentary group in the European Parliament. In the current European legislature, AfD was part of the parliamentary group Identity and Democracy, of which RN and La Liga are also part.