The former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, is the new chairman of the arch-conservative Union of Values. The 60-year-old was elected on Saturday at a general meeting in North Rhine-Westphalia with 95 percent of the votes, as the group announced. Maassen has been making headlines for years with statements on the right-wing edge and has also angered Union politicians. Maassen belongs to the CDU, but party leader Friedrich Merz no longer sees a place for him in the party.
The chair of the Values Union had been vacant since Max Otte’s resignation a year ago. Otte had been nominated for the AfD as a candidate for the office of Federal President. In the meantime he has also been expelled from the CDU. Simone Baum acted as spokeswoman for the federal executive board. The Value Union is not an official association of the Union. According to its own statements, it has around 4,000 members – not all of them are also members of the CDU or CSU.
Maassen wants to campaign for this
Maassen had already explained on Tuesday what he wanted to do in the new post. He would “work for the implementation of Christian-democratic goals, for conservative and liberal values and against any kind of eco-socialism and gender wokism,” he wrote on Twitter. On Sunday evening he added there that the value union stands for a “reasonable, non-ideological policy in continuation of the policy of (Konrad) Adenauer, (Ludwig) Erhard and (Helmut) Kohl” and – with a view to the former Chancellor Angela Merkel – for a ” Break with the disastrous Merkel era”. “I am sure that we will gain the approval of many members and former members of the CDU and CSU who reject a continuation of the left-wing course of the current party leadership.”
In the past few days, Maassen has again come under heavy criticism. In a tweet he claimed that the thrust of the “driving forces in the political and media space” was “eliminatory racism against whites”. In an interview he spoke of a “red-green racial theory”. As a result, several CDU politicians called on him to leave the party or threatened to apply to be expelled from the party.
Maassen is a member of the Thuringian CDU, but has no office or function in the state association. The state board of the Thuringian CDU asked him in a unanimous decision on Thursday evening to leave the party. “The measure is full,” Thuringia’s CDU leader Mario Voigt said and criticized that with his statements, Maassen fished in the folkish, that he had crossed borders.
Merz: The measure is full
CDU leader Merz also said to the “Bild am Sonntag”: “The measure is full. We have asked Mr. Maaßen to leave the party. Excluding the party is not easy, but we are currently carefully examining what options we have. ” Maassen’s language and ideas no longer have a place in the CDU.
CDU Vice Andreas Jung also emphasized that Maaßen was causing serious damage to the CDU and had lost nothing in the party: “Our Union stands for uniting and integrating, while Maaßen defames and continuously pours oil on the fire,” said Jung on Sunday of the Germans press agency. So that the credibility of the CDU is not permanently damaged, action must now be taken. “The procedure for excluding the party must be initiated promptly. A clear edge is now required.” It’s about credibility as the people’s party “in the middle with the C”.
Prien: A union of values and a union don’t work at the same time
The deputy federal chair of the CDU, Karin Prien, demanded that her party declare membership in the Union of Values incompatible with membership in the CDU. The Value Union is “an association clearly outside the CDU, which presumes to want to shift the discourse within the CDU clearly to the right, towards the AfD,” said Prien of the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” (Monday edition). Maassen’s election as chairman of the Values Union is “after a large number of lapses, the final proof that membership in this group does not fit in with Christian Democratic values”.
The current President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Thomas Haldenwang, accused his predecessor in the office of damaging the agency with radical right-wing statements. “Because we are always associated with such things,” said Haldenwang on Deutschlandfunk. Haldenwang said of Maassen “that he appears through very radical statements, statements which I can really only perceive in a similar way from the extreme right of political aspirations”. He agrees with statements made by the federal government’s anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, “who clearly sees anti-Semitic content here (…)”.
The Value Union defended its new chairman. Haldenwang’s current statements are “an unsuitable attempt” to make Maassen close to anti-Semitism. “They are just as free of evidence as they are absurd,” it said in a statement. At no point in time had Maassen made any anti-Semitic statement, nor was there any statement that could have been interpreted in the direction of anti-Semitism.