Exit due to illness: Tauber prefers to withdraw from politics

Tuesday March 16, 2021

Exit due to illness
Tauber prefers to withdraw from politics

Last autumn, CDU man Peter Tauber announced his early exit from federal politics. Now everything is going faster than planned. The Secretary of State for Defense wants to take his hat off at Easter.

The former CDU General Secretary and current Secretary of State for Defense Peter Tauber is withdrawing prematurely from politics due to illness. He had already planned this for the federal election in September. On Monday, however, he announced on Facebook: "At Easter I will resign from my position as Parliamentary State Secretary. I discussed that with the Federal Chancellor and the Federal Minister of Defense." He will also resign from his Bundestag mandate soon.

"The step is not easy for me," wrote the 46-year-old Hesse. "After my illness three years ago, two more operations became necessary. The first operation was carried out at the end of January, the second operation forces me to take a longer break."

Tauber had already announced his retirement from politics for this fall in October. "Would I have gotten sick at all if I had been more careful with myself – and with others -? Maybe not," he said at the end of last year, "Zeit Online". At the time, he thought he was going to put "all of this" away and still run marathons three times a year.

Tauber was CDU General Secretary from 2013 to 2018. During this time he had campaigned against internal party resistance for an immigration law and dual citizenship. Both are now represented by the CDU. The 46-year-old also advocated making the CDU "younger, more feminine and more colorful". The opening of the party to lesbians and gays was also a concern of his – the CDU's structural and statute committee is currently working to anchor lesbians and gays in the Union (LSU) as a so-called special organization with a permanent place in the party .

Tauber has been a CDU member since 1992, and from 2003 to 2009 he was state chairman of the Junge Union in Hesse. The historian with a doctorate has been in the Bundestag since October 2009. Last year he was still traded as a possible successor to Ursula von der Leyen in the Ministry of Defense.