“Union of Values”, a new party in Germany / The conservative opposition in the country has split The German ultra-conservative group Werteunion (Union of Values) announced on Saturday that after a general meeting it decided to withdraw from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of former Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Christian Social Union (CSU), its regional ally in Bavaria, and create a new political party, further contributing to the fragmentation of the political landscape in that country, which has been stable until now, according to Reuters and AFP, according to News.ro.

Members of the conservative group overwhelmingly gave leader Hans-Georg Maassen, during a closed-door meeting in the city of Erfurt, the mandate to initiate the founding of a “conservative-liberal” party, according to a statement from the group.

Maassen is a former homeland security official who is popular with anti-immigration voters.

“With a large majority, Verteunion members voted to create a party with the same name,” said Hans-Georg Maassen.

“The party could already compete in regional elections in eastern Germany and could cooperate with all parties (…) that are ready for political changes in Germany,” he added, not excluding cooperation with the far-right nationalist party. The AfD is currently contested in Germany.

The Verteunion party will be quickly established to participate in the state elections in Thuringia, Saxony and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in September. According to some data, a political movement can be born even in February.

Werteunion was founded in 2017 by a group of CDU and CSU members who opposed Angela Merkel’s policies, especially regarding the admission of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to Germany. Hans-Georg Maassen is the former head of Germany’s domestic intelligence who was forced to resign in 2018 after comments he made against immigration.

The new party said it would have approximately 4,000 members, most of them from the CDU and CSU.

The far right is gaining strength in Germany

With the creation of new parties, Germany’s political landscape risks becoming even more divided after the formation of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) 11 years ago, which took votes away from the traditional heavyweights of the political spectrum, the SPD (social democrats) and the CDU (conservatives). .

Sahra Wagenknecht, a well-known figure in the German far-left movement, also founded her own party in early January.

The anti-immigration party AfD, which has sparked much competition, leads opinion polls in three regional elections in the east of the country, where it has the most supporters.

The main parties, the CDU and Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s SPD, have ruled out any coalition with the AfD.

The announcement comes as the AfD finds itself in the spotlight after it emerged that some of its members attended a meeting in November regarding the mass deportation of immigrants and German citizens of “unassimilated” foreign origin.

On the other hand, two members of the Werteunion also took part in the meeting in Potsdam, according to the German publication Correctiv.

For its part, the AfD confirmed the presence of its members, but denied that it supported the migrant deportation project, which was defended at the meeting by the identity movement activist, Austrian Martin Zellner, a supporter of the “great replacement” theory. .

The revelations about this meeting shook Germany, the content of the discussions caused comparisons with Nazi ideology. Demonstrations against the AfD increased in Germany after the news, with protests expected to take place in 100 towns and cities between Friday and Sunday.

More than 100,000 people have already taken part in such protests across Germany on Saturday.