A German Member of the European Parliament (MEP) has suggested that Chancellor Angela Merkel will have to go into hiding in South America following her tenure, for fear of violent reprisals from the German people for her immigration policy. Her comments, made during a television debate, drew audible gasps from the audience.

Beatrix von Storch, a spokesman for An Alternative for Germany (AfD) was immediately confronted by the debate host, Anne Will, who challenged her with one of her own Facebook posts in which she accused Merkel of “ruining our country like no one since 1945”.

“I’m taking bets that Merkel will leave the country when she steps down – for security reasons,” the post continued, reports Die Welt.

When quizzed on whether she was serious about what she had posted, von Storch replied: “I mean that she should go into exile to Chile or South America”.

The comment drew audible gasps from the audience thanks to its allusion to the fate of Nazi and socialist leaders following the downfall of their regimes.

Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann escaped prosecution for decades following World War II by fleeing to South America, while East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) leader Erich Honecker sought refuge in Chile following the collapse of communism in East Germany.

Yet despite jeers from the mainstream, Angela Merkel is known to have had strong links to communism in her youth. A biography published in 2013 caused a stir in Germany as it revealed that the Chancellor was secretary for “Agitation and Propaganda” in the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) youth organisation while working at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin during the 1980s.

The German leader brushed off this episode by claiming her only duties were to buy theatre tickets and organise book readings, but former colleague and former German Transport Minister Günther Krause, who, working with Mrs. Merkel during the dying days of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) told the biography’s authors:

“With Agitation and Propaganda you’re responsible for brainwashing in the sense of Marxism. That was her task and that wasn’t cultural work. Agitation and Propaganda, that was the group that was meant to fill people’s brains with everything you were supposed to believe in the GDR, with all the ideological tricks. “And what annoys me about this woman is simply the fact that she doesn’t admit to a closeness to the system in the GDR. From a scientific standpoint she wasn’t indispensable at the Academy of Sciences. But she was useful as a pastor’s daughter in terms of Marxism-Leninism. And she’s denying that. But it’s the truth.”

Marxism teaches that European societies pit classes of people against each other in continuous struggle, a struggle which could only come to an end, as Marx and his colleague Engels put it starkly in The Communist Manifesto, “in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

Ms. Von Storch’s comments came during a televised debate on whether Germany should follow Austria’s lead in setting an upper limit for the number of migrants it accepts.

Armin Laschet, deputy leader of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), attacked Ms. von Storch when she refused to back down, saying “You and your upper limit. We’ve already heard what you’ve got to say at the lower limit!”

He continued by attempting to defend Mrs. Merkel’s open borders policy, insisting that the Chancellor had never promised that all who come could stay. Emphasising the importance of resolving the conflicts which are fuelling the migrant flow, he praised the Russian President Vladimir Putin for “co-operating” in Syria.

And he raised fears that the European economy would suffer if trucks had to wait at border crossings all across Europe, echoing a claim by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker who insisted last week that reinstating border controls would cost the bloc €3 billion a year.