The CDU Presidium has unanimously called on former President for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, to leave the party. If he does not leave the CDU by Sunday (February 5) at 12 p.m., the party’s federal executive should initiate an exclusion procedure against Maassen “and withdraw his membership rights with immediate effect,” the CDU announced on Monday after deliberations in the party’s presidium . “There is no place in our party for his statements and the ideas expressed with them,” says the text of the resolution.
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”. He is a member of the Thuringian CDU, but has no office or function in the state association. The state board of the Thuringian CDU had already unanimously asked him on Thursday evening to leave the party.
The decision text 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 Bureau supports the request and has set the deadline for Sunday.
In addition, the Presidium “dealed with the so-called “Union of Values”” and “expressed its political disapproval of this organization”. Anyone who is a member of the CDU cannot at the same time be a member of the “Union of Values”, it said. Maassen was elected chairman of the conservative association on Saturday at a general meeting in North Rhine-Westphalia with 95 percent of the votes. According to its own statements, it has around 4,000 members – not all of them are also members of the CDU or CSU.
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 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. It operates as a registered association and is not one of the official party organizations.
