Dhe former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, is to be expelled from the CDU. The federal board decided on Monday to initiate a corresponding procedure, as the German press agency learned from participants. A longer, difficult elimination process is expected. In the first instance, a district party court in Thuringia is responsible.
Maassen had previously failed to comply with a request from the party leadership to leave and in a statement also rejected all allegations of party-damaging behavior. The CDU leadership accuses him, among other things, of using “language from the milieu of anti-Semites and conspiracy ideologues to ethnic expressions”.
“He has lost nothing in the CDU”
Shortly before the deliberations of the top committees in Berlin, Secretary General Mario Czaja confirmed that Maassen had “clearly distanced himself from the basic positions of the CDU both in his choice of words and in his substantive topics”. “A fire wall” had been breached by Maassen. “He has lost nothing in the CDU.”
Maaßen, a member of the CDU for many years, ran unsuccessfully as a direct candidate for the CDU in the 2021 federal elections in Thuringia. He has no office or functions in the party. Since the end of January he has been federal chairman of the far-right Union of Values, which is not an organization of the CDU, but in which numerous party members have joined forces. At the end of January, the CDU presidium issued a “political disapproval” for the union of values. Anyone who is a CDU member cannot also be a member of the Union of Values.
Maassen had triggered criticism with various statements. On Twitter, for example, he wrote that the thrust of the “driving forces in the political and media space” was “eliminatory racism against whites”. In an interview he spoke of “red-green racial theory”.
In his statement, which became known at the weekend, the lawyer emphasized: “The political aim of the smear and character assassination campaign against me and the party expulsion procedure is obviously to build a “fire wall” in the CDU against all those who follow the left-green course of the party leadership don’t want to support it.” He suggested that the CDU leadership issue a warning as part of a regulatory procedure, for example, “which I would basically be willing to accept depending on the progress of the procedure”.
Exclusion procedures are generally considered to be difficult, and the requirements for this are high. In the SPD, for example, it took several attempts to force Thilo Sarrazin out of the party. And until it succeeded, there were still numerous controversies. Even with Maassen’s proceedings, a dispute that may last several years is expected.