There are voices that refuse to follow the choreography of political convention. They speak across the grain, they disrupt, they polarize — and in doing so, they draw their strength. Hans-Georg Maaßen belongs to that rare kind of political figure who refuses to act on the stage of power according to someone else’s script. A jurist, a civil servant, a man of the intelligence services — and by now a central figure in a conservative countercurrent that does not traffic in gentle undertones.
His departure from the WerteUnion marks more than a minor episode in party politics. It reflects a widening gap between state institutions and a political culture drifting ever further from the fundamental questions of its own legitimacy. Maaßen speaks openly about this rupture — not as an outside commentator but as someone who knows the mechanisms that produced it.
In a multipolar world, where power is negotiated rather than concentrated, voices that can speak about the relationship between statehood and freedom from lived experience carry weight. Hans-Georg Maaßen is one of them. He does not theorize; he speaks from a career deeply embedded in the inner workings of German security policy. As President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, he was part of a system designed to guarantee stability. Today, he is among those who no longer take that stability for granted.
Maaßen points out that Europe exists within an order in which Washington, Moscow, Beijing and emerging powers of the Global South are redefining the continent’s room for manoeuvre. In this shifting landscape, Germany is no longer an untouchable actor but a state facing growing vulnerabilities — both externally and internally. His call to defend state sovereignty is not nationalist posturing but a reminder that sovereignty is the precondition for meaningful agency in a reordered world.
Hans-Georg Maaßen does not speak to please. He speaks because he understands the structures now under strain — and because he knows that freedom cannot endure without the foundation of a functioning state.
