Leaked documents showed that Andreas Kalbitz was one of "14 neo-Nazis" who took part in the march. But the man attempting to become the populist Alternative for Germany's first state premier has denied extremist links.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/P. Pleul
Advertisement
Leading far-right figure Andreas Kalbitz on Friday admitted to participating in a 2007 commemorative rally organized in Greece by the ultranationalist Golden Dawn party.
News magazine Der Spiegel published a leaked report by the German embassy in Athens naming him as one of "14 neo-Nazis" who arrived from Germany for the far-right rally.
Kalbitz released a statement saying he took part out of "curiosity." However, he denied being part of a delegation including members of Germany's neo-Nazi NPD party.
The group reportedly unfurled a swastika flag over a balcony, which led to Greek anarchists firebombing the hotel. Kalbitz said any suggestion he was involved in the incident were "simply a lie."
Kalbitz leads the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the state of Brandenburg, where voters go to the polls on Sunday. The populists could emerge as the strongest political party in the state that surrounds the German capital, Berlin.
Kalbitz is seen as one of the more extreme figures in the party, along with Björn Höcke, the AfD's leader in the eastern state of Thuringia. A positive election result could see his influence on the party grow.
"Whoever surrounds themselves with neo-Nazis and marches with right-wing radicals abroad, tramples all over our democratic values," German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz of the center-left Social Democrats said on Twitter. "The evidence against the AfD leader in Brandenburg weighs heavy."
Brandenburg State Premier Dietmar Woidke said he hopes that the electoral winner will not be "a party that stands for exclusion, hatred and agitation."
Leading members of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have often made provocative, if not outright offensive, remarks — targeting refugees or evoking Nazi terminology.
Image: Britta Pedersen/dpa/picture alliance
Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia first made headlines in 2017 for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. In July 2023, he echoed Nazi rhetoric by declaring that "This EU must die so that the true Europe may live." In 2019, a court ruled that it was not slanderous to describe Höcke as a fascist.
Image: picture-alliance/Arifoto Ug/Candy Welz
Alice Weidel
One of the best-known public faces of the AfD, party co-chair Alice Weidel rarely shies away from causing a row. Her belligerent rhetoric caused particular controversy in a Bundestag speech in 2018, when she declared, "burqas, headscarf girls, publicly-supported knife men, and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth, and the social state."
Image: Sebastian Kahnert/dpa/picture-alliance
Maximilian Krah
Maximilian Krah, the AfD's top candidate in the 2024 European Parliament election, has called the EU a "vassal" of the US and wants to replace it with a "confederacy of fatherlands." He also wants to end support for Ukraine, and has warned on Twitter that immigration will lead to an "Umvolkung" of the German people — a Nazi-era term similar to the far-right's "great replacement" conspiracy theory.
Image: Ronny Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images
Alexander Gauland
Former parliamentary party leader Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. He said Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
Christian Lüth
Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. "The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD," Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. "We can always shoot them later, that's not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn't matter to me."
Image: Soeren Stache/dpa/picture-alliance
Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts — but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said in 2016. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers," she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Murat
Harald Weyel
Not all of the AfD's scandals are about racism: Sometimes they are just revealing. Bundestag member Harald Weyel was caught in a scandal in September 2022 when a microphone he clearly didn't know was on caught him expressing his hope that Germany would suffer a "dramatic winter" of high energy prices or else "things will just go on as ever."
Image: Christoph Hardt /Future Image/imago images
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, former head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
