The former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, is to be expelled from the CDU. The federal board of the party decided unanimously on Monday to initiate a corresponding procedure. CDU leader Friedrich Merz said the board had also revoked Maassen’s membership rights with immediate effect. The decision was “inevitable”, “the clear dividing line” was drawn today. CDU General Secretary Mario Czaja had previously said that Maassen had “clearly distanced himself from the basic positions of the CDU, both in his choice of words and in his substantive issues”. He “lost nothing more” in the party.
In a tweet, Maassen claimed that the thrust of the “driving forces in the political and media space” was “eliminatory racism against whites” and “the burning desire” that “Germany should die”. He also gave an interview to the publicist Alexander Wallasch for his blog. In this, Maassen speaks of racism that is “acted against the native Germans”. And he criticizes an allegedly existing “green-red racial theory, according to which whites are regarded as an inferior race and that Arab and African men must therefore be brought into the country”.
The Presidium of the CDU had already asked Maassen on January 30 to leave the party of his own accord. At the time, he was accused of continually violating the principles of the CDU. “There is no place in the Union for his statements and the ideas expressed with them.” Because he repeatedly uses a “language from the milieu of anti-Semites and conspiracy ideologues to ethnic expressions”. Maassen was “obviously not interested in the well-being of the CDU”.
Maassen wanted to accept a warning. That wasn’t enough for the CDU
Maassen did not comply with the request. Instead he wrote in a statement: “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. ” He suggested that the CDU leadership issue a warning against him, for example, which he would then “in principle be willing to accept depending on how the proceedings progressed”. The CDU federal executive board did not agree to that.
In the 2021 federal election, Maassen ran as a direct candidate for the CDU in a Thuringian constituency, but was defeated by his social democratic opponent. Maassen is currently chairman of the ultra-conservative Values Union. According to its own statements, it has around 4,000 members, a large proportion of whom are also said to be members of the CDU or CSU. Merz said on Monday that his party executive had now also made a political decision according to which membership in the Union of Values was incompatible with that in the CDU.