‘My knife is at your throat,’ says a Turkish barber, wielding a razor blade around Maximilian Krah’s face. Krah, one of the most controversial figures in Germany’s right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, sits for a shave – and a grilling. The TikTok video of the conversation has racked up 2.8 million views.
Does Krah hate foreigners, the bearded barber asks. No, but ‘eight million have come since 2013’, he says, and ‘too many don’t work and don’t want to work’. Does he hate Islam? Religion is good but ‘not as a reason to blow up people’.
This isn’t quite what you’d expect from a member of the AfD but Krah is not your typical politician. The 48-year-old Catholic and father of eight, who is a member of the EU parliament and was once accused of employing a Chinese spy (he turned out also to be a German spy), is one of the party’s most controversial figures. He has also emerged as a central character in the AfD’s social media campaign. ‘I am the German Donald Trump,’ he tells me when we speak on the phone. His online presence is anything but subtle.
The AfD has taken to social media because of the ‘Brandmauer’ or ‘firewall’, which means that the other parties have until recently refused to work with it. The media, meanwhile, often exclude it, so the party’s decision to focus its efforts on social media has paid off. In last year’s EU parliament elections and the state elections in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg, the AfD either won the under-25 vote or came close.
Krah likes X because he believes it is where political trends begin, but he has found a bigger audience on TikTok.
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