Emboldened and unrepentant, Germany's far-right poised for expanded parliamentary role

BERLIN (Reuters) - The largest bloc of far-right lawmakers elected to a German parliament since 1945 will take up their seats on Tuesday when a new Bundestag is inaugurated to steer Germany through its biggest diplomatic and economic crisis in decades.

The Alternative for Germany came second in the February 23 election, the best performance by a far-right party since World War Two, helped by years of economic underperformance and uncertainty caused by Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

But when the new parliament opens, the far-right group will not just be twice as large with 152 seats, but will contain lawmakers who have expressed more extreme views than seen before.

One new member is Maximilian Krah, a former European Parliament member who caused French far-right leader Marine Le Pen to repudiate the entire party after he defended Adolf Hitler's murderous paramilitary SS in a newspaper interview.

Krah's rehabilitation - he was excluded from the party's benches in the European Parliament - underlines the party's growing self-confidence as it narrows the gap between it and the election-winning conservatives.

Mathias Helferich, a close ally of Bjoern Hoecke, leader of the party's far-right wing, entered parliament in 2021 but was excluded from the party's benches after messages were leaked in which he described himself as "the friendly face of the Nazis" - though he later said this was meant as a joke. He has now been readmitted in full standing.

The one-time libertarian party of anti-euro economists has shifted far to the nativist right since its 2013 founding, opposing Muslim immigration, leaning towards Russia in the war against Ukraine, and demanding the European Union's abolition.

Several new members have military backgrounds, many are close to Hoecke and one was previously in the banned far-right NPD party. Another is a secondary school history teacher.

Economic uncertainty - Germany has had two consecutive years of recession - and nerves about the war and Donald Trump's return to the White House also helped other outsiders. The Left party, successor to the East German Communists, came back from near oblivion to record their best electoral performance in years.

The AfD's formal powers will be limited - it is just shy of the 25% of seats needed to set up parliamentary committees of enquiry, which would have provided ample opportunities to harangue the government conservative leader Friedrich Merz aims to form.

But the compromises Merz has had to make to pass a debt package with the help of the Social Democrats, his intended coalition partner, and the Greens, have helped the AfD: a weekend poll showed his lead over the AfD had narrowed since the vote.

With 24% of seats in the 630-member parliament, it will have space to set the tone of debate - and insinuate itself in other ways as the broad "firewall" against political cooperation with the far-right crumbles.

A court ruled earlier this month that the parliamentary football team could no longer exclude the AfD's legislators from its ranks.

While many legislators refuse even to acknowledge in the corridors legislators from a party they regard as undemocratic and anti-constitutional, a fresh generation of activist lawmakers say that approach has run out of road.

"My differences with them are political, not personal," said Ferat Kocak, who became the first Left lawmaker to win a seat in the former West Germany in the election. "I was in a lift with one the other day and I said: 'Salam alaykum'".

(Reporting by Thomas Escritt; Editing by Toby Chopra)