A one-time key supporter of Angela Merkel has alleged that Germany is now a “dictatorship” and that Merkel “pulled the plug” on the country.
Arnold Vaatz – who served as the deputy chairman of former Chancellor Merkel’s Christian Democrats in Germany’s federal parliament – also partly blamed her for the war in Ukraine.
Speaking to the daily newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Vaatz lamented that Germany was no longer a “sensible” country, nor free like Poland or the Baltic States.
“Germany is a dictatorship of language rules, the use or non-use of which determines a person’s career prospects,” he claimed, adding that his ex-Christian Democrat allies were now too busy aping “green” politicians to solve the country’s problems.
He particularly lashed out at Germany’s obsession with “wokeism and gender gaga”, as well as its failure to promote pro-family and pro-child policies that would boost the national birth-rate.
“The low birth-rate is due to the fact that all communities geared towards raising children have been discredited over the past 20 years,” he claimed.
“As soon as you turn on the radio, it’s about sexual minorities. The normal family feels more and more like the dirt left over from times gone by.”
Vaatz also attacked Merkel’s policies on energy, immigration and defence, claiming that she had ruined the country and helped embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.
“Merkel was a catastrophe for the whole of Germany, in which, embarrassingly, I was personally involved because I didn’t want to admit it for a long time,” he told the paper.
“She robbed the country of its future,” he added. “She pulled the plug on Germany by ruining the energy base. She destroyed the Bundeswehr [armed forces]. She wiped the Euro’s stability criteria off the table.”
He went on to decry the current European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, alleging that when she was appointed as Germany’s defence minister back in 2013 it was solely due to the fact she was a woman.
“We recently had three female defence ministers who were chosen for the sake of gender representation rather than their defence policy expertise,” he said, adding that the two men who proceeded them were “even weaker”.
The former parliamentarian was more accommodating regarding supporters of the populist German party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). While attacking the party itself as being an “unelectable … Russian-interest group in Germany”, he also claimed he understood why people wanted to vote for it.
“Most of them are desperate about the path taken by the Union parties under Merkel,” he said.
“And by addressing things that all other parties avoid out of cowardice, stupidity or opportunism, the AfD has earned their respect. On some points, such as energy policy, it has adopted the position of the 1990s [Christian Democrats] and is therefore closer to the truth than any other party.”
As an ideological breakaway from the evermore progressive Christian Democrats, Vaatz has been lauded as one of the few politicians in Germany to foresee Europe having problems with Russia.
Vaatz is said to have repeatedly warned Merkel about the threat posed by Russia to the likes of Ukraine, with the then-MP warning that Putin ultimately wanted to see Russia regain control of its former Soviet territories.
He was reportedly mocked by his former party colleagues and ignored by Merkel, who pursued an energy-policy highly dependent on Russian fossil fuel exports.
