For years he was one of the best-known figures in the AfD, and in 2013 he was even one of the co-founders of the Alternative for Germany. Now the former Hamburg AfD chairman Jörn Kruse has joined the CDU. “The fact is correct,” said Kruse on Wednesday at the request of the German Press Agency after the “Hamburger Abendblatt” reported on the personnel. When asked by WELT, he did not provide any information about his reasons.
The 73-year-old was accepted by the CDU district association Hamburg-Nord, whose chairman is CDU state chief Christoph Ploß. “The CDU district board of Hamburg-Nord, to which all movements and associations of the CDU belong, has unanimously decided to admit Professor Jörn Kruse to the CDU,” said the CDU on request.
Kruse is Emeritus Professor of Economics and was a close companion of Bernd Lucke. He belonged to the Eurosceptic wing of the AfD. From 2013 to 2015 he was the first state chairman of the AfD in Hamburg. After Frauke Petry was elected federal spokeswoman, he resigned from his position in Hamburg and ended all involvement at the federal level of the AfD. The party has clearly moved to the right and is therefore no longer his party, he said as a reason.
Unlike his wife, who gave up her AfD party membership back then, Kruse stayed in the party. Until 2018 he was parliamentary group leader of the AfD in the Hamburg Parliament. With Kruse as the top candidate, she entered the Hanseatic city’s parliament in 2015. But in 2018 he left the AfD. Kruse was a non-party MP until 2020.
Shortly thereafter, he toyed with the idea of a political restart in the Union. In an interview at the end of 2020, he said that a comeback in the CDU was “very concrete” conceivable for him under a Union chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz. “The CDU has long lacked market orientation and competence.” Merz brings this with him. He is now federal chairman of the CDU and its parliamentary group leader in the Bundestag.
“The CDU has always been successful when it has united Christian-social, liberal and conservative tendencies. Such an approach has always strengthened democracy in Germany,” said Ploß, according to the statement on the reasons for Kruse’s admission to his district association. “Today’s AfD is just a pool of right-wing extremists and racists in Germany.” The AfD belongs “on the pyre of history,” said Ploß.
The AfD reacted with sharp words to Kruse’s entry into the CDU. “The change to the ‘marked out’ CDU fits into the picture of Kruse’s failed party career, which is long over,” said state chairman Dirk Nockemann, according to an AfD statement. “By joining the CDU, she is using political junk.”
For Kruse it is the second major party change. He found his first political home at the age of almost 20 in the SPD. He was a member of the party for 26 years before leaving in 1994.
