The CDU Presidium has unanimously called on former President for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, to leave the party. Otherwise, the party’s national executive should initiate an exclusion procedure against Maassen, the CDU announced on Monday after deliberations in the party’s presidium.
The CDU Presidium has set a deadline for the former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, to leave the party. In a unanimously passed decision, Maassen is asked to leave the CDU by 12 noon next Sunday, as the party announced on Monday. If he does not comply with this request, the presidency applied to the CDU federal executive committee to “initiate a party exclusion procedure and to withdraw his membership rights with immediate effect”.
Last week, CDU General Secretary Mario Czaja asked the 60-year-old to leave the party. According to the information, the Presidium distanced itself “emphatically from Maassen’s statements” on Monday. “Again and again he uses the language from the milieu of anti-Semites and conspiracy ideologues to ethnic expressions,” says the decision. Maassen was “obviously not interested in the well-being of the CDU”. He is constantly violating the principles and order of the party.
“There is no place in our party for his statements and the ideas they express,” emphasized the CDU presidium. The panel was unanimously of the opinion that Maassen “has to leave the party”.
According to the information, the CDU presidium also dealt with the union of values association, whose new chairman Maassen was elected on Saturday. CDU members who are also members there are asked in the Presidium decision to leave the Union of Values: “In our understanding, anyone who is a member of the CDU cannot be a member of the so-called ‘Union of Values’ at the same time.”
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. The group says it has around 4,000 members.
