extremism
CDU top committees advise on party exclusion from Maassen
Hans-Georg Maassen (CDU) at an event in Suhl. Is the former president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution threatened with expulsion from the party? photo
© Martin Schutt/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa
The party leadership of the Union has to deal with Hans-Georg Maassen today: The ex-constitutional protection officer is threatened with a party expulsion process. But the dispute is far from over.
The top committees of the CDU are discussing possible party expulsion proceedings against the former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen. At the meetings that are scheduled for the day after the repeat elections to the Berlin House of Representatives, first the Presidium and then the Federal Executive will deal with the topic. Party leader Friedrich Merz also gives a press conference at noon – together with Berlin’s top candidate Kai Wegner.
The board is expected to decide on a party expulsion procedure after Maassen ignored a request from the presidium to leave the party voluntarily by February 5. “There is no place in our party for his statements and the ideas expressed with them,” the text of the resolution said. However, elimination procedures are considered difficult, and the requirements are high.
Maassen calls the application “essentially hopeless”
In a statement to the CDU leadership, Maassen had rejected all allegations of party-damaging behavior. He suggests that the party leadership refrain from making an “essentially futile application to be expelled from the party”. Instead, she could, for example, issue a warning as part of a party order procedure. It is illegal that he has not yet been heard by the top committees of the CDU. However, his letter in the style of a legal brief to CDU General Secretary Mario Czaja is unlikely to change the party leadership’s mind.
“The political aim of the smear and character assassination campaign against me and the party expulsion procedure is obviously to erect a “fire wall” in the CDU against all those who do not want to support the left-green course of the party leadership,” it says. Maassen described the party leadership’s accusation that he had used language from the milieu of anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists as “absurd”.
Maassen ran unsuccessfully as a direct candidate for the CDU in the 2021 federal election in a constituency in Thuringia. He has no office in the party. Since the end of January he has been federal chairman of the arch-conservative Values Union, which is considered to be close to the CDU but is not an official grouping of the party.