Far right divided before EU vote as German MEP quits over SS comments

The lead candidate for Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in the European parliamentary election has resigned from the German far-right party's leadership as growing divisions between Europe's nationalist parties threaten to undermine their expected gains in next month's ballot.

- Jon Henley

Maximilian Krah, who last weekend told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that the SS, the Nazis' main paramilitary force, were "not all criminals", said in a statement yesterday that his comments were "being misused as a pretext to damage our party".

His SS remark, the latest in a series of controversies involving Krah and AfD, this week prompted France's far-right National Rally (RN) to say it would no longer sit in the same European parliamentary group as the German party after the June elections.

Marine Le Pen, RN's leader, who has spent years trying to normalise her party to appeal to mainstream voters, confirmed yesterday that it needed to make a "clean break", accusing AfD of being held hostage by its most radical elements.

"It was urgent to establish a cordon sanitaire," Le Pen told French radio. "The AfD goes from provocation to provocation. Now it's no longer time to distance ourselves it's time to make a clean break with this movement."

The two parties currently dominate the European parliament's radical right and Eurosceptic Identity and Democracy (ID) group, which also includes Matteo Salvini's League in Italy, Austria's Freedom party (FPÖ) and Vlaams Belang in Belgium.

The group's members - many of which are still viewed as extreme in their national contexts - are on course to become the biggest winners of the European elections, with polls predicting their total seat tally could rise from 59 MEPs to about 85.