CDU General Secretary Czaja calls on Maassen to leave the party
Mario Czaja is Secretary General of the CDU
Source: dpa/Martin debris
According to General Secretary Mario Czaja, there is no place for Hans-Georg Maassen in the CDU because he uses “the language from the milieu of anti-Semites and conspiracy ideologues”. He therefore calls on the former president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution “decisively” to leave the party.
CDU General Secretary Mario Czaja has asked the former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, to leave the party. The 47-year-old wrote on Twitter on Tuesday morning: “We as the CDU emphatically distance ourselves from the statements made by Hans-Georg Maassen. Again and again he uses the language from the milieu of anti-Semites and conspiracy ideologues and again and again places himself close to the AfD.”
Maassen was obviously not interested in the well-being of the CDU, according to Czaja. His recurring provocations were intended to do nothing other than promote his own “ego show.” For the CDU he had increasingly become a burden. “There is no place in our party for his statements and the ideas they express. I therefore call on Mr. Maassen to resign from the CDU in Germany.”
The background to the demand is probably various statements by Maaßen, which recently triggered widespread criticism. In an interview last Monday, Maassen said that “whites” are “an inferior race according to red-green racial doctrine.” Previously, he had claimed in a tweet that “the driving forces in the political and media space” had “eliminatory racism against whites” and the “burning desire that Germany should perish” as “direction”.
The federal government’s anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, then accused him of having relativized the Holocaust. “The formulation of an alleged ‘eliminatory racism’ against whites he recently used in a tweet now clearly exceeds the limits of democratic legitimacy,” Klein said.Editorial network Germany“. Because “the adoption of vocabulary that was coined to describe National Socialist crimes” puts the Shoah into perspective and distorts the roles of perpetrator and victim. This is “typical of anti-Semitic agitation” and the New Right’s strategy of victimizing itself.
The Berlin CDU General Secretary Stefan Evers also called for Maassen’s exit on Monday evening: “That’s enough. Neither this thinking nor this language has any place in the CDU,” he wrote on Twitter.
And from the point of view of the Berlin CDU chairman Kai Wegner, there is no longer any place for Maassen in the party. “Mr. Maaßen has crossed another line,” Wegner told the “Tagesspiegel” with a view to Maassen’s recent statements about migration policy. “Now it has to be over. Anyone who makes such statements has no place in the CDU.”
CDU federal deputy Karin Prien again called on Tuesday for ex-Verfassungsschutz President Hans-Georg Maaßen to be expelled from the party. “If Mr. Maaßen is still a member of the CDU at our next federal executive board meeting on February 13, I will submit a request to the federal executive board to exclude him from our party,” said Schleswig-Holstein’s education minister in Kiel. Maassen and his statements are no longer tolerable in the Union. “His repeated use of anti-Semitic and conspiracy theory codes, his trivialization of racism and Nazi ideology and the openness he displays for right-wing extremists – all of this is incompatible with the values of the CDU,” said Prien.
High hurdles for party exclusion in Germany
According to the Political Parties Act, the parties are free to choose their members. Expulsion, however, is linked to strict conditions: A member can only be expelled from the party if they intentionally violate the statutes or significantly violate the principles or rules of the party and thereby cause serious damage to it. This can be difficult to prove in individual cases. That’s probably why Czajas asked Maassen to resign himself.
Maassen and CH Beck ended their collaboration last week. He was involved in an online commentary on the Basic Law of the legal specialist publisher. The publisher decided to take advantage of the opportunity to sign the publishing contract with Dr. A spokesman announced on Thursday in Munich that Maaßen would end. As a result, Maassen himself terminated it on January 17.
The commentary was technically not objectionable, said the publisher. With regard to the person and the public statements by Maassen, however, a heated discussion with progressive polarization arose. This harms the Basic Law Commentary, its editors and the publisher.
After several controversial statements in November 2018, the lawyer was put on temporary retirement after a good six years in office as President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.