BERLIN ( Associated Press) — Germany’s main opposition party is trying to get rid of what it called a trend of “absolute racism against whites” after one of its members and the former head of the country’s national intelligence agency complained.
The leadership of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union on Monday unanimously approved a motion for Hans-Georg Maassen to leave the party. He told that in the event of not doing so voluntarily before Sunday, he would demand to start the eviction process.
Maassen was removed as director of the BfV national intelligence agency in 2018 after apparently downplaying acts of violence perpetrated by the far-right against immigrants in the eastern city of Chemnitz. He has since become a major, if marginal, figure in the far-right CDU, the party once led by former Chancellor Angela Merkel, which ran unsuccessfully in the 2021 national parliamentary elections.
The party leadership’s patience with Maassen ran out after a mid-January tweet in which he said the “driving forces in the political media sector” were guided by “anti-elimination racism and a burning desire to let Germany fall apart”.
“Her language and way of thinking have no place in the CDU,” party leader Friedrich Merz told Bild am Sonntag newspaper over the weekend. “It’s over.”
According to Monday’s resolution, Masen “repeatedly uses language very close to anti-Semitism and that used by conspiracy theorists.”
In Germany, expelling members of a party is a complex and lengthy process and often ends in failure. Merz acknowledged that “it is not completely simple”, but said the party was analyzing its possibilities.
