In a post, the Hesse SPD is campaigning with the murdered Kassel district president Lübcke. The outcry is great, the post disappears a little later. But the social democrats consider the criticism to be disproportionate.
The Hesse SPD wants to contain the discussion about their social media contribution to the murder of the Kassel district president and CDU politician Walter Lübcke. The controversial contribution was withdrawn on Friday because it had been misused by political opponents, said the deputy spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group, Cord Wilke. With their outraged reactions, politicians from the CDU tried to distract from their own responsibility in the fight against right-wing extremism.
In its post, the Hesse SPD asked: “Could the murder of Dr. Walter Lübcke have been prevented? The responsible interior ministers Bouffier, Rhein and Beuth were obviously overwhelmed with the political leadership of the LfV.” LfV stands for State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which is accused of significant failure to investigate the right-wing extremist scene from which Lübcke’s murderer comes.
The social media post showed a collage with photos of Hessian CDU politicians. The former Prime Minister of Hesse, Volker Bouffier, the incumbent Prime Minister, Boris Rhein, and Hesse’s Minister of the Interior, Peter Beuth, could be seen on it. Rhein and Beuth are to be questioned as witnesses in the state parliament’s investigative committee on the Lübcke murder in the next few days.
The SPD contribution had triggered outrage among CDU politicians and beyond. The general secretary of the federal CDU, Mario Czaja, asked on Twitter about the responsibility of the SPD state leader and federal interior minister Nancy Faeser: “Have you released that? Who is responsible for it? Are you ashamed?”
Hesse’s SPD general secretary Christoph Degen explained that the tweet came from the state parliamentary group, with which the party operates a joint account on Twitter. However, the authorship is clearly marked for each contribution. Degen said: “Nancy Faeser is the state chairman of the party and no longer belongs to the parliamentary group.” The SPD politician called on the CDU to “shift down a gear”. When it comes to the “dirtiest election campaign the Democrats have ever conducted,” those responsible should remember their own campaign against dual citizenship or slogans like “Stop Ypsilanti, Al-Wazir and the Communists” from 2008. SPD faction leader Günter Rudolph had also accused the CDU of “campaign noise”.
A new state parliament is expected to be elected in Hesse this fall. The CDU politician Lübcke was shot dead by right-wing extremist Stephan Ernst on the night of June 2, 2019 on the terrace of his house in the Kassel district. The state parliament’s investigative committee was set up in 2020 to investigate the role of the Hessian security authorities in the murder case.
