Armin Laschet can get pretty sloppy when something goes against the grain. And the fact that Sandra Maischberger wants to talk to him for minutes about how the CDU boss is doing with this group on the far-right of his own party goes against the grain of him. They are “overrated”, and the conservatives in the CDU also wanted nothing to do with it. “But we can do the show about the Union of Values!”
The ARD presenter doesn’t want that at all. Only, she still has a few questions.
The fact that conservatives in the CDU do not want to have anything to do with the club is also quite recent. On the contrary, since the “Union of Values” was founded in 2017, conservatives have always sought proximity to the group, not in spite of, but because the party leadership under Angela Merkel strictly refused to recognize it as a sub-organization. A greeting to the general assembly seemed to be a low-risk means of setting oneself apart from the chancellor.
Greetings to the “Union of Values” were once in vogue
Jens Spahn, for example, Parliamentary State Secretary in the Ministry of Finance at the time, assured the troops of his appreciation in 2018. The Union needs such circles and an attitude “that broad, middle-class classes have often sorely missed.”
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In 2019, Philipp Amthor from Mecklenburg promoted with a welcoming address for “fighting together for a bourgeois-conservative policy”, “within the party”. Even CDU Vice Thomas Strobl had agreed to speak at this meeting in Filderstadt. The Baden-Württemberg resident withdrew at the last minute.
No matter how much the leadership at the time around co-founder Alexander Mitsch emphasized – and had it recorded in a resolution – that the border with the AfD would be preserved, it became increasingly clear that not everyone there sees it that way.
Since the election of the new board at the end of last week, the slide to the right has been manifested, which caused a number of leading representatives to resign last year. The new chairman Max Otte paints a “new dictatorship” on the wall in “lateral thinkers” demos and accuses the Office for the Protection of the Constitution of being “politically instrumentalized”. His deputy Klaus Dageförde was active in neo-Nazi organizations, which he now dismisses as a youthful sin.
Just “nonsense” or already stepping over the border?
Laschet is in a bind with this. Ideologically, the liberal Aachener has nothing in common with the Ultras. But before the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, to engage in complicated debates about an incompatibility resolution, as parts of the CDU workforce and political competitors, who are looking firmly to Magdeburg, have been vehemently calling for it, would be the stupidest thing a CDU leader can do.
If only because someone like Otte is far too practiced in verbal cross-border commuting to allow himself to be caught when it is clearly exceeded.
Otte’s dictatorship sayings are “nonsense, and nonsense is not a reason for exclusion from the party”, Laschet also defends against “Maischberger”. Is there no right attitude in this? “That’s stupid!”
But there are also real stupidities, the moderator insists. It becomes too much for the CDU boss: He doesn’t know any of them, and Spahn would certainly not send any more greetings there today!
Laschet will of course know himself that that is just enough to keep the dilemma from falling shut.
If the AfD wins in Magdeburg on Sunday, the chancellor candidate will then come under even more pressure to explain. If not, the competition will stay tuned anyway.
For Laschet’s intention to tie up the conservative wing of the party again, the whole process is poison anyway.
In the east, quite a few party friends are already struggling with the sharp line that the chairman draws from the AfD under threat of exclusion from the party. With the new attention that the “Union of Values” attracts, he must also expect every signal in a conservative direction that the Otte troop will receive it with ostentatious applause – and thus poison it from the ground up.
