Former three-star general Joachim Wundrak is running for mayor of Hanover for Alternative for Germany (AfD) after expressing contempt for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open border policies.
Wundrak, a former member of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, has accused the German leader of facilitating mass migration, which he has labelled an “anti-German” policy, Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung reports.
In an interview with the paper, Wundrak said that he chose to leave the CDU in 2017, saying Merkel could not recognise what she could have done differently during the height of the migrant crisis in 2015.
He said that joining the populist, anti-mas migration AfD in 2018, shortly after he retired as a general in the Luftwaffe, came at a risk, saying: “Anyone who confesses to supporting the AfD is bullied and marginalised. They also get into the focus of Antifa.”
The alt-left extremist Antifa group have repeatedly targetted AfD politicians, advocating for assassinations and even allegedly taking credit for a brutal attack on AfD politician Frank Magnitz earlier this year in Bremen.
Wundrak noted that Merkel’s CDU could lose the confidence of the German armed forces, the Bundeswehr, saying: “The AfD is the only party that fully supports the Bundeswehr.”
“The support of the AfD is likely to be even greater in police circles than among the soldiers,” he added.
“The comrades in the police experience the aberrations of German politics on the street every day. They are at the front.”
While the AfD is routinely painted as extremist by other political parties and the press, Wundrak said he had not experienced any extremism after joining and said the party platform was in line with the CDU’s platform from 2003.
On the subject of Ms Merkel, Wundrak said: “Merkel has sworn an oath to Germany, but she already has a problem talking about a German people. She prefers to speak of ‘population’. Many German politicians struggle to profess their own nation.”
“The protection of one’s own borders is no longer a priority goal. Germany is giving more and more sovereignty to the EU, the European Central Bank, to supranational organisations. I do not agree with this. The nation-state is the primary form of organisation for Germany. Where structures become too big, an undemocratic spirit quickly arises,” he added.