“We can only reach AfD voters to a very limited extent at the moment.”
(Photo: IMAGO/Chris Emil Janssen)
Berlin The Union has climbed to its highest level in 18 months. In the Sunday trend, which the opinion research institute Insa collects for “Bild am Sonntag”, the CDU and CSU come to 29 percent. That is one percentage point more than in the previous week.
The SPD remains stable at 20 percent, the Greens (16 percent) and the FDP (seven percent) also keep their values from the previous week. The AfD would come to an unchanged 15 percent, the left to five percent. The other parties could unite eight percent of the votes.
Meanwhile, the election of the former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, to chair the arch-conservative Union of Values is causing unrest in the CDU. The grouping is not an official union association. It claims to have around 4,000 members.
The CDU chairman Friedrich Merz still sees no more room for Hans-Georg Maassen in his party. “This is the limit. We asked Mr. Maassen to leave the party. Excluding a party is not easy, but we are currently examining carefully what options we have,” said Merz of “Bild am Sonntag”. Maassen’s language and ideas no longer have a place in the CDU.
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For years, Maaßen – a member of the Thuringian CDU – has repeatedly caused controversy with controversial statements. In the past few days he had again come under heavy criticism.
The former president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution is the new chairman of the arch-conservative Union of Values.
(Photo: dpa)
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.
>> Read here: On the future of the CDU – conservative and cool?
In the “Bild am Sonntag” Merz also moved away from his previous resolution of wanting to halve the AfD. “I have not repeated this statement since 2018,” said the CDU leader. “The extremist structures and the far-right rhetoric in the AfD are solidifying. The AfD stands firmly on Russia’s side and is mobilizing primarily in East Germany,” said Merz.
He has by no means given up his claim to win back voters from the AfD. “But we will steadfastly stick to the Union’s course of clearly demarcating ourselves to the far right,” emphasized Merz. “We can only reach AfD voters to a very limited extent at the moment,” he added.
More: “Pascha” statement – Lindner denies the CDU and Merz’s claim to leadership