(LifeSiteNews) — The co-head of the anti-globalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) has said that he was debanked for his political views.

During a recently aired talk show on Germany’s state-funded public TV station ARD, Tino Chrupalla said that his bank account “was canceled by Postbank because I am an AfD member.”

For Chrupalla, this was evidence of “how we are marginalized, discredited,” and that one is no longer allowed to express one’s opinion freely.

Asked for comment by German newspaper Welt, Postbank replied that it does not comment on individual customer relationships due to banking secrecy and that it cannot, therefore, say anything regarding the reasons for the alleged termination of Chrupalla’s account.

Postbank, a subsidiary of financial giant Deutsche Bank, did, however, note that it could close anyone’s bank account at any time. “In principle, both business partners have the possibility to terminate an account relationship without giving reasons,” a representative of Postbank told Welt.

This would not be the first instance that the bank account of a member from the populist AfD was closed without a reason. In 2018, Deutsche Bank terminated all accounts of AfD politician Nicolaus Fest, and in 2020, the Direktbank ING closed the bank accounts of the head of the AfD Thuringia, Björn Höcke, as well as his wife’s accounts. In both cases, the banks refused to give a reason for their decision.

In similar cases against conservative politicians in the U.K., internal documents revealed that the two prominent leaders of the Brexit movement, Nigel Farage and colleague Richard Tice, were indeed debanked for their political views.

READ: Nigel Farage announces initiative to fight debanking after docs show he was axed for political reasons

The AfD is currently polling between 20% and 23% nationwide, meaning the party has more than doubled its support since the 2021 national election, where it achieved 10.3% of the vote. Since the AfD has been surging in the polls due to the massively unpopular Green-Socialist-Liberal “traffic light” government coalition, leftist politicians have publicly floated the idea of banning the AfD outright because they consider its members to be “far-right extremists.”

READ: Germany could ban populist political party surging in the polls