Marcus Andreopoulos
The arrest of German citizen Jian Guo on 23 April 2024, catapulted the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party back into the center stage of German and European politics. Accused of acting as an agent for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Guo had been a parliamentary assistant for Maximillian Krah, the AfD’s lead candidate in the upcoming European elections. If true, these allegations represent yet another attempt by the CCP to compromise and spy on the political environment of the West, using a tried and tested strategy. For the AfD, Guo’s arrest raises further questions about the party’s close ties to China, solidifying the view that it has become a trojan horse for hostile state actors to undermine German and European democracy.
Krah is not the first AfD politician to have murky connections with authoritarian regimes, having previously been questioned by the FBI over allegedly receiving payments from Russian agents. Another leading AfD candidate for the European Parliament’s June elections, Petr Bystron, has his own troubled history with hostile state actors. In the same week that news of Krah’s aide broke, Bystron was accused of taking €20,000 from a pro-Kremlin news broadcaster, Voice of Europe. The allegations were brought to light by Czech intelligence, who claimed to have video evidence of Bystron receiving the cash from a senior figure within Voice of Europe at a time when the website had been sanctioned by the Czech government. These developments, coupled with the fact that members of the AfD had been invited to ‘observe’ Russia’s recent elections, expose the AfD as one of many conduits for Russian influence in Europe.
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