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.