Will German WerteUnion share Tea Party's fate?

The WerteUnion (Values Union) was founded in 2017 by members of Angela Merkel's Christian Democrat Union (CDU) who believed that Germany's last big-tent party had moved too far left.  

The movement followed a similar path to that of the Tea Party, which emerged in 2009 within the US's Republican Party, bringing together libertarians and right-wing populists focused on challenging the leadership of the Republican Party, which they felt wasn't doing enough to confront Democratic President Barack Obama. 

In contrast, the WerteUnion focused its ire within the center-right CDU on Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom adherents saw as being too liberal. Expansion of day care that challenged the conservative family model, the end of military conscription, and first and foremost Merkel's open policy on migration led some German conservatives to believe they had lost control of their party.

"We wanted to reverse the left-wing course that Merkel undertook," Alexander Mitsch, the WerteUnion's former chair and a founding member, told DW.

Merkel too liberal?

Merkel's shifts in policies allowed her to capture the center and her party to stay in power for the 16 years of her tenure as chancellor. But, like in the US, those changes led to growing resistance from the right. "It's a typical reflex of a process of change in a party," political scientist Uwe Jun told DW. "Some groups shout: we don't want that, that goes too far for us!"  

The far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD), founded in 2013 by euroskeptic academics, had risen in the polls after zooming in on growing xenophobic sentiment in 2016 in the wake of the influx of refugees, mainly from Syria.

Though the AfD became the opposition to the right of Merkel outside of the party, the WerteUnion grew to several thousand members and became the opposition within the party, although it is not officially a party organization.

Its members supported and nurtured relationships with politicians to the right of Merkel within the CDU and its more conservative regional sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) in Bavaria, and even the far right.

Even politicians in the CDU's mainstream seemed to have toyed with supporting the inner-party far-right to counter the rise of the populists, In 2018 current Health Minister Jens Spahn sent a letter of support to the opening of a meeting of the WerteUnion, encouraging members to act in a broader way to make the AfD "superfluous."   

The WerteUnion sought to restrict immigration, strengthen the German military and lower taxes. But, despite the commitment to cutting back government finances, the group was never as committed to fiscal conservatism or as unified as the Tea Party were. 

"They oppose Merkel's policies, but they don't really have a specific idea how the CDU should develop. This makes them different from the Tea Party movement," Professor Andreas Rödder of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz told DW. "They have a clear idea of limited government and lean state, but here there is no vision. It is the rather vague idea of the good old times when the CDU was much closer to their minds."

Those "good old times" harken back to the 1950s, not long after the CDU was founded as an interdenominational party with its roots in the Zentrum Partei of the Weimar republic: staunchly anti-communist, with a belief in law and order, a business-friendly ideology, and conservative family values with stay-at-home moms, anti-abortion and no acceptance of same-sex relationships.

In the years since its founding, the WerteUnion has moved even further to the right, straining further the relationship with the CDU/CSU's center.

The Tea Party initially also experienced strain with the leadership of the Republicans because of its right-wing positions. Though in 2016, the US publication Politico noted that the Tea Party movement was essentially completely dead, partly because some of its ideas and combative style of politics had been adopted by the mainstream Republican Party. 

Now the WerteUnion's star is also sinking.

Pandering to the AfD

There has been an exodus from its ranks following the election of Max Otte as the new head of the group at the end of May. Prominent CDU sympathizers like Friedrich Merz  and the controversial former spy chief Hans-Georg Maassen  have distanced themselves. Otte is close to the AfD and even admitted voting for the party in the last general election in 2017.

Otte is expected to try to move the WerteUnion closer to the AfD, although any form of rapprochement with the AfD has continuously been pronounced a red line by the CDU leadership.  

After Otte was elected, CDU/CSU chancellor candidate Armin Laschet, who represents the Merkel wing of the two-party alliance, was dismissive of the WerteUnion, stressing: "This group has nothing to do with the CDU."  

Since Otte's election, there has been a wave of defections and splits in the group. 

According to Oliver Kämpf, deputy head of the group in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, it still has about 3,700 members. That number pales in comparison to the CDU's overall 400,000 members and the CSU's 140,000. But the outflow from the WerteUnion has damaged the influence it did have. "The name has been destroyed," Kämpf said.    

The WerteUnion's apparent near collapse has proceeded rapidly, but its demise seems unlikely to resolve the conflict in the CDU/CSU of the type that has split parties in other democracies in recent years.  

"The WerteUnion is destroying itself. It's imploding. It's the same process of self-radicalization. This is the same pattern you can observe with the Tea Party," Rödder said. "I don't think the WerteUnion will be a peril for the existence of the CDU," he said. But he believes that the division in the party as a heritage of Merkel will continue. 

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A previous version of this article misidentified the head of the CSU. Markus Söder is the CSU party leader. We apologize for the error.