The Deputy leader of the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party has blasted Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel as a “dictator” in comments made this weekend.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) newspaper reports that Alexander Gauland, the deputy leader of the anti-mass migration party, said Mrs. Merkel represents “a policy of human flooding” and blasted her as a “dictator”.
He said that her policy is an “attempt to have the German people gradually replaced… from all parts of the world population.”
“Today, we are tolerant, and tomorrow strangers in their own country” he said during a joint appearance with his party colleague Björn Höcke in Brandenburg Elsterwerda on Thursday night.
And he added: “We are open-minded, we are tolerant, we are not against foreigners. But it is our country! And it is our people! And it is not the land of strangers.”
Politico notes that the line about becoming strangers in one’s own country is a phrase often used by the National Democratic Party (NPD) in Germany, which has Nazi sympathies.
The AfD party has been no stranger to controversy, in fact often welcoming it in order to get more coverage in the national media.
Recently the party achieved record results in local elections in Germany, raising questions as to whether Mrs. Merkel would be able to continue to lead her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party.
But the Chancellor has doubled down on her pro-migration record, going so far as to insist that if Europe closes its borders, the continent will be destroyed.
The dictator comparison comes just days after a Turkish news outlet compared Mrs. Merkel to Adolf Hitler, and just a few weeks after new crime figures from Germany’s interior ministry revealed that non-Germans and migrants are committing a disproportionate amount of crime in the country.
AfD has been routinely targeted by violent, hard-left activists.
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