Meyer-Heder announces his resignation
Bremen’s CDU leader stumbles over AfD statements
September 29, 2023, 12:43 p.m
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It has been clear for some time that Carsten Meyer-Heder will not run for state chairman of the CDU again. Now he has resigned from his post early. He draws conclusions from an interview with AfD statements “that produced a different effect” than intended.
The state chairman of the Bremen CDU, Carsten Meyer-Heder, has announced his resignation. The Bremen CDU regional association announced this at a press conference. In an interview with the regional magazine “buten un binnen” Meyer-Heder had previously said that he thought it was wrong to rule out cooperation with the AfD at the local level per se.
In the interview, he made statements about the AfD that “created a completely different effect on the public than I intended. I have never been and am not suspected of being close to the AfD. In that respect, I regret it “I’m very happy that my statements were understood in this way,” said Carsten Meyer-Heder.
In the interview, the CDU politician did not rule out cooperation at the local level with the AfD under certain conditions. “Where there are correct points that the AfD promotes at the local level, you can’t say: That’s nonsense,” said Meyer-Heder in a video excerpt from “buten un binnen”. It’s about the content, said Meyer-Heder. “If we want to make things happen and we agree with the AfD: why not?” He said he was more afraid of the left-wing members of Bremen’s citizens than of some people in the AfD.
At the beginning of September, Meyer-Heder announced that he would not run as state chairman of his party again. He wanted to stop his work as CDU boss from May 2024 and concentrate on work in his company. Meyer-Heder has been the state chairman of the Bremen CDU since June 2019. As the top candidate, he had previously led the CDU to victory in the 2019 state election. With 26.7 percent of the vote, the CDU became the strongest faction in the state parliament for the first time.