Franz Handlos

Franz Handlos (9 December 1939 – 10 June 2013) was a German politician.

Biography Handlos first came to prominence as member of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU), serving the party in both the Bundestag, where he represented Deggendorf, and the Landtag of Bavaria. Handlos, along with Ekkehard Voigt, represented the right of the party within the Bavarian CSU, with both men staunch critics of the leadership of Franz Josef Strauss. Handlos broke from the CSU in 1983 when Strauss agreed to accepting a major bank loan from East Germany, a move Handlos saw as accepting partition and helping to stabilise the communist state.

As a result of the split, Handlos and Voigt joined with well-known political commentator and former CSU activist Franz Schönhuber to form their own party, Die Republikaner (REP) in 1983, with Handlos as the leader. Handlos saw the party as only slightly to the right of the CSU and aimed to REP as a basis to build a bundesweite (federal) version of the CSU, rather than simply concentrating on Bavaria. This view was not shared by Schönhuber, who had a more right-wing populist outlook and was inspired by the success of the French National Front.