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Max Otte (archive)
Photo: Karlheinz Schindler / dpa-Zentralbild
According to his own statements, the German-American economist Max Otte was elected as the new chairman of the CDU-affiliated values union on Saturday.
In the past, the CDU politician was noticed with AfD-friendly statements.
Before the federal election in 2017, he had announced in the "Wirtschaftswoche" that he wanted to give the AfD his vote.
Now Otte won the election according to media reports with 115 to 103 votes against the Bavarian tax officer Juliane Ried.
Otte becomes the head of the association that wanted to exclude him from the party just under two years ago.
At that time, Otte had spoken of agitation against rights in the case of the murdered CDU politician Walter Lübcke.
Alexander Mitsch, head of the Value Union at the time, had said: "Such thoughts shock us." They would have "triggered a wave of horror" among the members of his organization.
Sorry for deleted tweet
Otte then deleted his statement on Twitter and called it a "mistake" there.
An exclusion of Otte from the CDU would automatically have resulted in his exclusion as a full member of the Values Union - but this was not realized.
Otte has been a CDU member since 1991.
Otte has been managing money from private investors as a fund manager since 2008, while also holding a professorship for general and international business administration at the University of Applied Sciences in Worms.
Politically, he has been offending with right-wing statements for years and has repeatedly defended the AfD.
From June 2018 to January 2021 he was chairman of the board of trustees of the AfD-affiliated Desiderius Erasmus Foundation.
In 2017, he told Wirtschaftswoche that, with the exception of Björn Höcke, the AfD was “not right-wing extremist”.
The AfD is rather "90 percent a bourgeois-conservative party."
Irishman
