Metropolico.org, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The recent revelations linking one of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) MEP Maximilian Krah’s assistants to Chinese intelligence provided a perfect opportunity for the left wing in Brussels to amplify their ongoing smear campaign against all conservative lawmakers in the European Parliament—despite the embarrassing lack of credible evidence against anybody else.
“The AfD is once again showing its true, unpatriotic face. Anyone who votes AfD in the European elections is voting for more influence from Russia and China,” German MEP Daniel Caspary of the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) said on Monday. Politico—“the always faithful servant of the Brussels bureaucracy,” as our senior columnist Mick Hume put it while talking at NatCon—smugly described Germany’s second most popular party as the “Alternative for Dictators.”
It’s easy to get caught up in the web of intentionally vague accusations, half-truths, and irrelevant details, so if we want to understand how we ended up here, we first need to understand there’s not one, but two stories here, related to each other—but not necessarily in the way that the political and media mainstream would have you believe.
Two stories, one narrative
In late March, Czech authorities shut down the news site Voice of Europe (VoE) after an investigation conducted by the country’s national security services claimed that the publication was at the the center of a Russian interference network that allegedly paid European lawmakers from several countries for interviews in which they promoted Kremlin talking points.
According to the Czech daily Denik N, the authorities identified politicians from six EU member states (Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Poland) who have allegedly accepted cash from VoE. Curiously, only one name became public—AfD’s Petr Bystron’s.
The report claimed that the authorities are in possession of a voice recording implicating Bystron, but the tape has still not been released despite the entire AfD demanding the Czechs make it public. No prosecution has been launched against anyone to date.
In a statement on their Telegram channel on April 1st, Voice of Europe struck back at the accusations, saying:
The fact that the architects of this hoax have not provided any concrete evidence to support their claims leads us to believe that they simply wanted to silence a news platform that is critical of their viewpoints and their globalist agenda, and which is furthermore open to alternative opinions and perspectives.
Through its authoritarian actions, the Fiala administration has stripped us of the right to a fair trial and set a dangerous precedent in government and media relations within the European Union.
The news outlet also reminded readers of “the 2016 Russiagate hoax perpetrated against U.S. President Trump by globalist politicians in cahoots with America’s politicized intelligence agencies, the latter of which are increasingly being weaponized against Christians, conservatives, and other dissident Americans.”
Weeks have passed, but neither Prague nor Brussels has produced any evidence against Bystron—or anybody else. Nonetheless, a relentless smear campaign began in and outside of the halls of the European institutions against everyone associated with national conservative parties, and the Parliament began drafting a resolution to condemn the alleged Russian interference, set to be approved on Thursday, April 25th.
To be clear, we do not yet know the truth behind the vague allegations against Voice of Europe, because whatever evidence the Czech authorities have is still classified. But lack of evidence has not prevented the left using the alleged scandal as a stick to beat the right across Europe. Conservative MEPs are being collectively demonized in Brussels with the sole purpose of undermining their credibility close to the EU elections.
Enter Maximilian Krah, a German MEP from AfD, and incidentally number one on the party’s European Parliament electoral list. On Monday, a Chinese-born assistant of Krah’s, one Jian Guo, was arrested on espionage charges. According to German federal authorities, Guo was a Chinese intelligence asset reporting to Beijing about the Parliament’s most anti-CCP members.
Krah denies having any involvement in, or knowledge of, Guo’s CCP connections. But in any case, the AfD should have seen this coming months ago. The European Conservative was the first to break the story about Guo possibly being on the CCP payroll back in April 2023, so the party had ample time to prepare.
Predictably, the Left is now conflating the two AfD-related cases: the vague ‘RussiaGate’ scandal allegedly involving the Voice of Europe and Petr Bystron, and the police investigation into a CCP spy network involving Krah’s aide Guo. Lacking evidence to support the former, Brussels relies on the latter to retroactively connect the two and somehow ‘prove’ that all European conservatives are Chinese and Russian assets.
The reason is simple: right-wing populist and national conservative parties, among them the AfD, are predicted to significantly increase their presence in the European Parliament after the June EU elections, which is reportedly the biggest concern of the current left-wing majority in Brussels. The Guo arrest is the perfect opportunity to try to discredit not only the AfD but the entire populist Right, amplified by Voice of Europe’s alleged Russia scandal, regardless of whether it is true or not.
The current focus on this Russia-Chinagate double scandal also provides the left with a timely answer to the Qatar- and Pfizergate scandals. The biggest conflict of interest, interference, and corruption scandals of the past five years are all linked to the leftist and mainstream political forces in the parliament and the European Commission. Yet these scandals, many of which have not been sufficiently addressed, are left to linger in the Brussels air until after the elections, while the latest scandals, real or imagined, involving the right are blown up into big campaign issues.
Of course, there is Russian and Chinese interference in Europe (as well as American for that matter) because that’s how great powers operate. Any elected members of the European Parliament who are found guilty will deserve every condemnation. But the point is that there are facts and there are political narratives—and the relationship between the two is seldom as direct as we are led to believe.