The CDU gave Maassen an ultimatum: he should voluntarily leave the party by February 5 at 12 noon. A union spokesman announced that the ex-officer for the protection of the constitution let the deadline pass. Now he has the opportunity to comment.
The controversial former head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, 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 in Berlin. 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.
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: “We have no reaction from Mr. Maassen.” Maassen himself could not be reached at first.
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. The chairman of the right-wing conservative union of values ??was informed by email and letter on Wednesday that he had the opportunity to get involved in writing until next Thursday.
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 head of government, Michael Kretschmer, was reluctant to initiate party exclusion proceedings against Maassen. “I don’t think you have to exclude people overnight,” said the CDU politician 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.
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 protests 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 Minister of the Interior, Horst Seehofer, put Maassen on temporary retirement after much 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 said. “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.
