The CSU parliamentary group leader Thomas Kreuzer, 63, will retire from politics next year. He announced this on Tuesday and named personal motives for no longer running in his constituency of Kempten-Oberallgäu in the state elections in autumn 2023. There he wanted to “set the course for a new beginning” and “have time for private life,” said Kreuzer. However, he wants to remain in office until the end of the current legislative period and lead the CSU parliamentary group into the 2023 election year, as stated in his statement.
The decision comes as a surprise, since Kreuzer had actually already decided to run again. It could have been his seventh term in the state parliament, in 1994 he entered parliament for the first time. Kreuzer has been at the head of the parliamentary group since October 2013. He was previously State Secretary in the Ministry of Education and Head of the State Chancellery under Prime Minister Horst Seehofer.
The fact that Kreuzer could remain at the head of the parliamentary group beyond the upcoming state elections has long been considered questionable in CSU circles. Especially in the Corona crisis, some MPs were dissatisfied with Kreuzer. You would have liked him to place the sometimes critical attitude of the parliamentary group more aggressively with Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU).
Most recently, Kreuzer was re-elected as parliamentary group leader in April 2021, with 78.5 percent of the votes. A significantly weaker result than in autumn 2018, when it was 97.5 percent. It was recently heard in CSU circles that individual MPs are said to have signaled their parliamentary group leader not to re-elect him again. How clear these signals really were and what role they might have played in Kreuzer’s decision, however, is left open by the announcement of his withdrawal.