Possible party exclusion: CDU turns against Maassen

The CDU has been wrestling with its member Hans-Georg Maassen for years. After more controversial statements, Secretary General Czaja is now asking him to leave. Others want to apply for Maassen’s exclusion.

The Secretary General of the CDU, Mario Czaja, has asked the former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, to leave the party. Maassen repeatedly uses “the language from the milieu of anti-Semites and conspiracy ideologues,” Czaja wrote on Twitter. The former constitutional protection officer put himself “again and again close to the AfD”.

He gets support for this from Thuringia, where Maassen ran for the CDU in the federal election campaign in 2021. The general secretary of the Thuringian CDU, Christian Hergott, said that MDRhe asked Maassen to leave the party promptly.

The background is Maassen’s tweets, in which he saw himself as a victim of a “shabby dirt campaign that has been going on for days”. Maassen suspected on Monday evening that it was about preventing his election as chairman of the right-wing “Union of Values”. In a tweet that has since been deleted, he had previously claimed that current politics in Germany was characterized by “eliminatory racism against whites”.

Some in the party are calling for expulsion

In the event that Maaßen does not leave voluntarily, the CDU Federal Deputy Karin Prien announced that she would apply for a party expulsion. The Berlin CDU parliamentary group leader, Kai Wegner, is also calling for one. According to information from the “Spiegel” the Konrad-Adenauer-Haus is already in contact with the CDU Thuringia to initiate an exclusion process. So far, the party’s top politicians have not wanted to speak of an exclusion, despite years of criticism.

Just last week, the well-known publisher CH Beck wanted to end its collaboration with Maassen. According to a publisher’s spokesman, Maaßen forestalled the publisher by giving notice. He had previously contributed to the publishing house’s commentary on the Basic Law.

Maassen missed a mandate in Thuringia

Maassen headed the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution from 2012 to 2018. After statements about allegedly falsified video recordings of riots in Chemnitz, he had to resign from office. According to research by “Spiegel”, Maaßen slowed down an observation of the sometimes extremely right-wing AfD by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution during his tenure.

Maaßen then appeared at the right-wing “Werte Union”. He considered future cooperation between the CDU and the AfD to be unlikely at this time, but not ruled it out. As a direct candidate for the CDU in the 2021 federal election, he missed a mandate in Suhl, Thuringia.

Office for the Protection of the Constitution: “Anti-Semitic Stereotypes”

In his statements in the past, Maassen repeatedly made comparisons between the GDR and today’s Federal Republic. In public broadcasting, he suspected “extremists and radicals” at work. He allowed himself to be interviewed several times by publications of the New Right. Stephan Kramer, President of the Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution, said in 2021 that Maassen was spreading “classic anti-Semitic stereotypes”. Maassen himself denies this.

Party leader Friedrich Merz has not yet commented on the personnel. A year ago, he said that Maassen’s statements “always just stayed below the limit” for “active party-damaging behavior”. The latter must be proven to Maassen for an exclusion.

Merz’ predecessors on the party presidency, Armin Laschet and Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, had repeatedly distanced themselves from Maassen during their tenure. However, they also spoke out against expulsion from the party. The CDU general secretary at the time, Paul Ziemiak, said in 2019: “Different opinions are represented in the CDU as the people’s party of the center – and that’s a good thing.”