Ukip under Fire for Choosing Candidate Who Called Islam 'Evil'
Anne Marie Waters, an activist from the anti-Islam Pegida movement, has also praised the far-right leaders Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders.
One Ukip MEP said the adoption of Waters, who this month appeared on the far-right Swedish web platform Red Ice TV, was "a massive worry”. He said he hoped to challenge it with colleagues, The Guardian reported.
The decision was also condemned by the leaders of the Liberal Democrats and Greens, who said Waters’ selection showed Ukip was embracing hard-right politics in an attempt to gather votes in the wake of the EU referendum.
Waters, who will stand in Lewisham East in south London, takes a robust attitude towards not just extremism, but Islam as a whole, which she described in a tweet last year as "evil".
She was deputy leader of the UK arm of Pegida, the German-formed far-right and anti-Islam group partly set up by Stephen Lennon, who, under the name Tommy Robinson, founded the English Defence League street organization.
