analysis
Members of the Union of Values were also present at the conspiratorial meeting in Potsdam, where a “master plan for remigration” was discussed. The club has had contacts with the right-wing scene for a long time. Now the CDU wants to clearly differentiate itself from the group.
The conspiratorial meeting of several actors from the right to right-wing extremist spectrum caused a stir last week. In addition to representatives of the AfD and the right-wing extremist activist Martin Sellner, two members of the “Union of Values” were also on site. The right-wing conservative club consists largely of CDU members, but it has been acting as a bridge to the extremist camp for years.
The Union of Values began as a coalition of Merkel’s opponents
The Union of Values was originally founded in 2017 as a gathering place for CDU members who were dissatisfied with the migration policy under then Chancellor Angela Merkel. They complained that the Union was “sliding to the left”. In the following years, a loose network of party members developed into what they described as an “influential association” with almost 4,000 members.
The now registered association stands for a clear course: the Union must become (more) conservative again. The Union of Values uses rhetoric that is familiar from the right-wing fringe. On its own website it criticizes “in particular mass migration, irrational economic and energy policy and hysterical climate policy.” All crises that would have led to a “threatening situation” for the country. Today it is no longer about “minor corrections” but “about everything”. It’s about whether “we are ready to make these achievements [der Bundesrepublik Anm. d. Red.]to sacrifice our identity and our values to left-wing ideologies.
The Union of Values does not explain what exactly “our identity” or “our values” should be in this context. But it seems clear to the club: the threat to the country comes from the left. On the “about us” page alone, the authors mention the “left-wing ideologies” or the “left-wing slide” four times. There is no separation from the right.
Don’t be afraid of extremists, lateral thinkers or the AfD
The staff of the Values Union has had excellent contacts with the right-wing camp since its founding and beyond. Its former chairman Max Otte, for example, appeared at events of the Lateral Thinking movement during the corona pandemic and represented positions that he interpreted as racist, anti-Semitic and nationalist. Otte was also chairman of the board of trustees of the AfD-affiliated Desiderius Erasmus Foundation and ran for the AfD in the federal presidential election in 2022. His deputy at the time, Klaus Dageförde, was a member of a right-wing extremist group in his youth.
After the murder of Kassel district president Walter Lübcke, Otte complained about a media “incitement against the right-wing scene” and declared that “the mainstream finally has a new NSU affair.” At the beginning of 2022, Otte was expelled from the CDU, and a few months later he also dropped the post of chairman of the Union of Values and withdrew from political business.
His successor was the former head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maaßen, who had already been criticized many times in advance. Maaßen has also maintained regular contact with AfD officials in recent years and attracted attention through trivializing comments about right-wing extremist riots in Chemnitz in 2018.
It was recently announced that Simone Baum, the state chairwoman of the Values Union of North Rhine-Westphalia, and her deputy Michaela Schneider took part in the secret meeting in Potsdam, where AfD members and the figurehead of the right-wing extremist “Identitarian Movement”, Martin Sellner, were also guests .
Union of Values opposes religious freedom for Muslims
In addition to the “left-wing ideology,” the Union of Values has a second clear enemy: Islam. Your position paper on the subject of immigration practically sounds like a supply for the “master plan for remigration” discussed in Potsdam. In it, the Union of Values claims, among other things, that those who have immigrated from Islamic countries since 2015 have “introduced diseases to Germany that were long considered extinct.” A claim that is simply not true
In its position paper on Islam, the Values Union also knowingly or unknowingly mixes the terms Muslims and Islamists and presents people of the Muslim faith as a fundamental danger. The association calls, among other things, for the right to criticize Islam and a ban on child marriages and forced marriages. But all of this is anchored in law anyway and does not require any change.
However, the Union of Values goes one step further and questions religious freedom for Muslims. The fundamental right to religious freedom was therefore written by the authors with “Judeo-Christian religions in mind”. In view of the “millions of immigration of people of Islamic faith”, it appears justified and necessary to “further develop and specify this fundamental right with regard to the peculiarities of a religion that simultaneously represents a political system”, according to the Union of Values.
Position divides CDU and CSU
With its views, which range from conservative to nationalist and Islamophobic, the Values Union also divides its members’ party. While CDU politicians like Wolfgang Bosbach have shown understanding for the association in the past and declared that the views “were naturally part of the Union’s spectrum of opinions just ten or 15 years ago”, Elmar Brok declared in 2020 that the union of values was a “cancer”, that one must “fight with all ruthlessness” so that it “cannot creep into the party.”
CDU leader Friedrich Merz now clearly positioned himself and his party at the CDU meeting: Simultaneous membership in the CDU and the Values Union should no longer be possible in the future – regardless of whether the Values Union becomes its own party or not.
A few weeks ago, Chairman Maaßen declared that he wanted to found a new party from the union of values. Party planning events are already being actively advertised on the club’s homepage. Maaßen explained in advance that he did not rule out cooperation with the AfD, unlike the CDU/CSU.
Whether as an association, as is currently the case, or possibly soon as a party: the Union of Values has opened the doors to the right-wing fringe since its founding. It has long since become a bridge between conservative, disappointed CDU members and right-wing extremist groups. Both their political positioning and their contacts with the right-wing fringe still exist today.
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Source: Stern
I have been working in the news industry for over 6 years, first as a reporter and now as an editor. I have covered politics extensively, and my work has appeared in major newspapers and online news outlets around the world. In addition to my writing, I also contribute regularly to 24 Hours World.
