At every opportunity, the Hamburg CDU state chairman Christoph Ploß, who is also a member of the German Bundestag, refers to the new team spirit in his party. But at the latest with the admission of the former AfD parliamentary group and state party chairman Jörn Kruse, which became public last week, many of the Christian Democrats had asked themselves how far along Ploß himself was in terms of teamwork. The committees of the northern district association headed by Ploß had agreed to accept Kruse without further consultation with the rest of the Hamburg party leadership. The CDU state board decided on Monday evening that there should no longer be anything like this in the future.
Before the meeting, there had even been talk of overthrow of Ploß, but it didn’t go that far – although even the leader of the CDU parliamentary group in the Hamburg Parliament, Dennis Thering, had distanced himself from the content of the recording. Previously, Thering and Ploß were as closely connected as two tandem riders, and the two found their way back to this form, at least in a joint press statement after the meeting. Ploß himself, who was also criticized by other district chairmen, did not refer to the specific case in his statement, but Thering did: “In the future, the state board will be involved in such sensitive personnel issues. With this procedure, we have created clarity for everyone,” he said. The proposal was approved unanimously by the board.
It was up to Ploß to formulate general guidelines and to thank him for “this strong signal of support”, although the resolution now indirectly disapproved of his behavior. Ploß: “The AfD is and will remain a right-wing extremist party with which the CDU cannot cooperate. The AfD belongs on the pyre of history. That’s why it’s important to offer reasonable former AfD members a political home.” He had already argued after Kruse’s admission. For those who are still members of the AfD, however, the door to the CDU is now closed, because, according to Ploß: “At the latest when a party is being observed by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, it must be clear to everyone that the threshold to extremism has been crossed. Anyone who still holds mandates in the AfD today does not fit in with the rule-of-law party, the CDU.”