The CDU wants to get rid of the heavily disputed former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen. However, he apparently does not want to leave voluntarily – Maassen has allowed a corresponding deadline to expire. Now he is threatened with expulsion from the party.
The controversial former head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen (CDU), has let the ultimatum to voluntarily leave the party expire, according to the CDU leadership. “The federal office of the CDU in Germany has not received a resignation from Dr. Maassen,” said a CDU spokesman for the German Press Agency in Berlin on Sunday. In the event that Maassen does not leave the CDU voluntarily by 5 February at 12 noon, the party presidium had applied to the federal executive committee to initiate party exclusion proceedings against Maassen and to withdraw his membership rights with immediate effect.
In the run-up to the corresponding meeting of the CDU federal executive board planned for February 13, Maassen will have the opportunity to comment in writing, the party spokesman said. Maassen was informed by email and letter on Wednesday that he had the opportunity to get involved in writing until next Thursday.
Hans-Georg Maassen was recently again heavily criticized
Maassen’s CDU state association in Thuringia also announced that no letter of resignation had been received there. Thuringia’s CDU General Secretary Christian Herrgott said when asked by dpa: “We have had no reaction from Mr. Maassen.” Maassen himself could not be reached at first.
The CDU presidium issued an ultimatum to Maaßen by 12 noon on Sunday to leave the party. In the past few weeks, he had again come under massive criticism for statements. In a tweet, he claimed that the thrust of the “driving forces in the political and media space” was “eliminatory racism against whites”. The historian and head of the Buchenwald Memorial, Jens-Christian Wagner, then accused him of “classic extreme right-wing reversal of guilt” and trivializing the Holocaust. In an interview, Maassen also spoke of a “red-green racial theory”.
Maassen said on Tuesday that he had only heard about the exit request from the media. He added: “First of all, I want to see the CDU’s briefs, I’ll check them with my lawyers, and then we’ll see.”
Saxony’s Prime Minister Kretschmer: Discourse would be “much more valuable”
Saxony’s Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer (CDU) was reluctant to consider a party exclusion procedure against Maassen. “I don’t think you have to exclude people overnight,” he said on Friday in the Sächsische.de political podcast. However, he could not explain what else Maaßen wanted in the CDU. “He never misses an opportunity to make it clear that he has nothing to do with what unites us here, what we want to achieve together.”
Kretschmer also made it clear that he considered a party exclusion to be legally difficult to enforce in general. “Because he’s excluded, his opinion doesn’t change. And I think having a discourse together and making it clear – that’s not the opinion of the Union, that’s not what it stands for – is much more valuable.” Maassen did a lot of damage to the CDU with his statements after the incidents in Chemnitz in 2018. “I have nothing that I find valuable in his contributions to the debate,” said Kretschmer.
Criticism from the SPD: “Merz and his Union must act”
Maassen, as then President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, was criticized in late summer 2018 for a statement about the demonstrations in Chemnitz. The demonstrations in Chemnitz came after a German was killed. The trigger for the Maassen controversy was a video that is supposed to show scenes of hunting foreigners. At the time, Maassen had doubted that there had been any “hunting” and thus sparked a debate about himself and his job as head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The then Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) put Maassen on temporary retirement after a long back and forth.
The parliamentary manager of the SPD parliamentary group, Katja Mast, accused the CDU of inconsistency in dealing with Maassen. He is still a member of his party, she told the German Press Agency. “It is still supported by party branches of the CDU. Maassen is the tip of the iceberg in the Union and stands for a flank to the AfD and to the right.” That harms Germany and democracy as a whole. “Friedrich Merz and his Union must act,” demanded Mast, referring to CDU leader Merz.
Source: Stern
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