Party sets him a deadline: CDU presidium calls on Maassen to leave

Status: 01/30/2023 1:33 p.m

The CDU Presidium unanimously called on former President Maassen for the protection of the constitution to leave the party. If he does not leave voluntarily by next Sunday, the party will initiate an exclusion process.

The CDU Presidium has given the former head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, a deadline to leave the party: he is to resign voluntarily by next Sunday afternoon, February 5th.

If he does not comply with the request, the party will seek an exclusion procedure, “and withdraw his membership rights with immediate effect,” said the CDU after deliberations in the presidium. “There is no place in our party for his statements and the ideas they express.”

“Obviously not in the interests of the CDU”

The text of the decision of the federal committee says about Maassen’s statements: “Again and again he uses the language from the milieu of anti-Semites and conspiracy ideologues to ethnic expressions.”

He was “obviously not interested in the well-being of the CDU. On the contrary, he constantly violates the principles and order of the party.” Secretary General Mario Czaja therefore asked Maassen to leave the party. The Presidium supports the request and has set the deadline for this until Sunday.

Chairman of the Union of Values

In addition, the presidium “dealt with the so-called union of values” and “expressed its political disapproval of this organization”. Anyone who is a member of the CDU cannot also be a member of the Union of Values, it said.

At the weekend, Maaßen was elected with 95 percent of the votes as chairman of the association “Werteunion”, an association of right-wing conservative oriented supporters of the Union, which is not recognized as an official party organization. The Union of Values, founded in 2017, sees itself as a group of conservative Christian Democrats. She argues that the CDU, under the then party leader Angela Merkel, had shifted too far to the left and had to take more conservative positions again. According to its own statements, it has around 4,000 members – not all of them are also members of the CDU or CSU.

Prien: Decision on incompatibility unavoidable

The deputy CDU chairwoman, Karin Prien, told the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” that Maassen’s election was “after a large number of gaffes, the final proof that membership in this group does not fit Christian Democratic values”.

She had already pushed for the incompatibility decision of the CDU against this group on Sunday, which she considers unavoidable. The union of values ​​is “an association clearly outside the CDU, which presumes to want to shift the discourse within the CDU clearly to the right, towards the AfD,” said Prien.

Tweet with conspiracy ideologies

In the past few days, Maassen has again come under heavy criticism. In a tweet he claimed that the thrust of the “driving forces in the political and media space” was “eliminatory racism against whites”. In an interview, the 60-year-old spoke of a “red-green racial theory”.

Maassen was President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution from 2012 to 2018. He had to vacate the post after questioning right-wing extremist riots in Chemnitz. In 2021 he failed in the federal elections as a direct candidate for the CDU in Thuringia. The state board of the Thuringian CDU had already unanimously asked him on Thursday evening to leave the party.

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