After the recent statements by the CDU politician and former head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, the Berlin CDU chairman, Kai Wegner, is calling for Maassen to be expelled from the party. “Mr Maassen has crossed another line. It has to be over now. Anyone who makes such statements has no place in the CDU,” Wegner told the Tagesspiegel.
Maassen had previously commented on racism towards white people in an interview. Not recognizing this is “an expression of a green-red racial theory, according to which whites are regarded as an inferior race and that Arab and African men must therefore be brought into the country”.
At the weekend, the former president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution also praised the “Heretics of the New Age” YouTube channel run by conspiracy ideologues from the Reich bourgeois milieu. “These smart and courageous young people are our future”, wrote Maassen on Twitter.
Wegner had opposed Maassen’s exclusion in the past
Maassen has been criticized for years because of controversial statements to migrants and during the corona pandemic. In 2019, the then CDU chairwoman Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer declared that she could not see any attitude in Maassen “that really connects him to the CDU”. The party leader later made it clear that she did not want her statement to be understood as a request to initiate party exclusion proceedings against Maassen.
Most recently, in January 2022, CDU politicians called for his expulsion from the party, including Saarland Prime Minister Tobias Hans and Schleswig-Holstein Education Minister Karin Prien. The federal chairman of the Christian Democrats Friedrich Merz had so far rejected the idea.
Berlin’s CDU leader Kai Wegner had also backed Maassen in the past. “Of course, Mr. Maaßen could also be a member of the Berlin CDU,” explained Wegner after Kramp-Karrenbauer’s statements, but qualified: “That doesn’t mean that I find every expression of opinion happy or share it.” Nevertheless, “people with different opinions, who may sometimes be uncomfortable, are welcome in the Berlin CDU”.
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