A post by the Hesse SPD on social media caused outrage on Friday. With a view to the state parliament investigative committee into the murder of the Kassel district president Walter Lübcke (CDU), the SPD had distributed a black and white collage with photos of Hessian CDU politicians on Thursday under the title “More than fifteen years of domestic political failure”. The Secretary General of the federal CDU, Mario Czaja, criticized on Twitter: “The action not only affects us and makes us sad. Walter Lübcke and his family members did not deserve this style.”
Several members of the Bundestag from the Union expressed their outrage. This is the “dirtiest election campaign that Democrats have ever done,” wrote the CDU federal executive board member Serap Güler. But there was also criticism outside of the CDU: Konstantin von Notz, Vice President of the Greens in the Bundestag, spoke of a “complete political derailment”.
In its post, the Hessen SPD asked: “Had the murder of Dr. Walter Lübcke can be 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. The collage shows, among other things, the former Prime Minister of Hesse, Volker Bouffier, the incumbent Prime Minister, Boris Rhein, and Hesse’s Minister of the Interior, Peter Beuth (all CDU).
The chairman of the Hessian CDU parliamentary group in the Lübcke investigative committee, Holger Bellino, called the social media post “tasteless and completely inappropriate”. The Hessian SPD parliamentary group resolutely rejected the criticism: “Politics lives on discourse, as does social media. The fact that the CDU is now trying to make their mistakes ours cannot be surpassed in terms of absurdity,” said parliamentary group leader Günter Rudolph.
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 investigation committee was set up in 2020 to investigate the role of the Hessian security authorities in the murder case.
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