When a house is on fire and someone comes by with a bucket to help extinguish it, they will be considered a rescuer in need.

Unless there is alcohol instead of water in the bucket.

As for the CDU politician Hans-Georg Maaßen, there has been a dispute for weeks about what he is carrying.

Members of the Union in southern Thuringia, who put him up as a candidate for the Bundestag, see in Maaßen a firefighter who has come to save them from the still powerful AfD in the east.

Morten Freidel

Editor in politics of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

  • Follow I follow

    Stefan Locke

    Correspondent for Saxony and Thuringia based in Dresden.

    • Follow I follow

      For others, however, the former President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is someone who sprays fire accelerators.

      One who does more harm than averts from the party.

      Taken in isolation, such an argument is nothing special.

      Sometimes regions put up candidates for the Bundestag who do not suit everyone.

      The argument is then usually: Our candidate should please the local voters, not the party leaders in Berlin.

      Suddenly a nationwide matter

      At Maaßen things are more complicated, because a few days ago the climate protection activist Luisa Neubauer accused him of spreading anti-Semitic content on the program “Anne Will”. Or rather she accused the party chairman of the CDU, Armin Laschet, of legitimizing “racist, anti-Semitic, identity and incidentally also science-denying content”, “embodied by Hans-Georg Maassen”.

      The Maassen case was no longer a mere constituency issue.

      Neubauer turned it into a nationwide one.

      Since then, many have asked: what to make of measure?

      And what are his followers' hopes for him?

      In parts of the Union, especially in the East, he is seen as a candidate with a clear edge, as someone who does not do anything and does not put up with anything.

      Ralf Liebaug, the district chairman of the CDU Schmalkalden-Meiningen, who had the idea to nominate Maassen, put it this way on the evening of the candidate election: Maassen is "a man who speaks a clear language that people in the region expect".

      Maassen did not disappoint the delegates

      Liebaug then added a sentence that illustrates the lack of meaning that they have felt here, south of the Thuringian Forest, for years. “He is known and taken seriously.” Maassen did not disappoint the delegates when he campaigned for their vote on April 30th. In 1978 he joined the Junge Union, Maaßen began. His motivation for this was "the increasingly left-wing teaching staff at the grammar school".

      Nine years later he went to the CDU because the party embodied with Helmut Kohl and Franz Josef Strauss "a clear anti-socialist attitude".

      That was well received.

      He doesn't see himself as conservative or even right-wing, continued Maaßen in his speech.

      No, rather he is a "grounded person, a child of little people".

      The perceived approval in the hall moved in the direction of one hundred and ten percent.

      In addition, because Maaßen was now handing out against “Berlin”, castigating the “tendency to arrogance” of the elites who had “nothing to do with the lives of small people”.

      Bulwark against the confusion

      The question of what a man like Maaßen, once one of the highest officials in the republic, who comes from Mönchengladbach and now lives in Berlin, has to do with the little people in southern Thuringia, was not posed by anyone, not even the Mayor of Suhl, who vehemently supported him in the end, pleaded with hopeless opponents from the region. No, the party members - with the exception of four women, mostly older men - are not primarily concerned with ensuring that their region is adequately represented in Berlin. Rather, for many, Maaßen is the symbol of a supposedly good old days and a kind of bulwark against the confusion of today.