BERLIN (Reuters) – A former German intelligence chief sacked after being accused of downplaying the threat posed by the far right founded a new party at a meeting aboard a ship on Saturday.
It is the third party to be founded this year in Germany, further fragmenting the political landscape before the European elections, votes in three Länder and in half of the country’s municipalities.
The Werteunion, or Union of Values, is led by Hans-Georg Maassen, who was dismissed as head of Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) in 2018.
The lawyer was forced to resign after questioning the authenticity of a video showing far-right extremists chasing migrants in the eastern city of Chemnitz.
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He has since stood out for his radical comments on immigration, attracting far-right activists to him.
A former member of the opposition Christian Democratic party, Hans-Georg Maassen is now being monitored by the security agency he headed, he said last month.
“12:32 p.m. Done!” “, he declared on the X platform, publishing a photo of him and his classmates in front of a German flag aboard a boat near Bonn, the former German capital.
Germany’s main parties are well behind in the polls compared to their levels in the 1980s, when the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats regularly won nearly 50% of the vote.
Earlier this year, left-wing activist Sahra Wagenknecht founded a new left-wing populist party.
The Werteunion finds itself in competition with the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party leading the polls in certain regions of the East.
While all other parties have ruled out working with the AfD, Hans-Georg Maassen recently said he would be ready to support their legislative proposals if they made sense – while ruling out a coalition with that party.
(Reporting by Thomas Escritt and Sarah Marsh; French version Elizabeth Pineau)
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