With a lot of trouble in their luggage recently, Hamburg’s chairmen of the CDU and FDP, Christoph Ploß and Michael Kruse, appeared in front of their respective party bases at the beginning of this week. On Monday, a state party conference of the FDP will meet in the Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (6.30 p.m.), on Tuesday a state committee of the CDU in the Besenbinderhof (7.30 p.m.). While only delegates and party leaders have the floor in the state committee of the CDU, all party members can have a say and vote in the FDP.
Even if the latest spat does not appear explicitly on the agendas of either party, it should not go unmentioned at the respective events. In the case of the FDP, it would even be quite surprising if not, the party says. One only very much hopes that the agenda item “debate” will be conducted in a matter-of-fact style and polite tone.
At least in the past, this was not often the case. Four young liberals (JuLis) and the state executive around party leader Kruse have been fighting too bitterly for months. The trigger was that ex-July boss Carl Cevin-Key Coste had criticized Kruse’s announcement of a lawsuit against the Hamburg corona hotspot regulation as a “PR action and unworthy of a constitutional party”. After further verbal accusations by and against the JuLis, the board of directors launched a party exclusion procedure against the critics – which is why they in turn hired the former Interior Minister Gerhart Baum (FDP) as a lawyer.
Even if the party congress will not take any decisions on the matter, it still has to repair a kind of collateral damage. Because at the end of June, the former HSV president and former FDP parliamentarian Carl-Edgar Jarchow resigned from the state executive board in protest against Kruse’s management style and now has to be replaced. According to reports, the only candidate so far is the diplomat Claus Krumrei.
Something has also happened with the JuLis themselves. After the resignation of the chairwoman Theresa Bardenhewer – she felt tamed by the state executive board and criticized the deputy state head Ria Schröder very directly in a WELT Am SONNTAG interview – the previous deputy Nils Knoben has now taken over. He is also one of the JuLis who fell out of favor with Kruse. The party’s only member of parliament, Anna von Treuenfels-Frowein, recently made a new top candidate dependent on the disputes being settled. She had won a direct mandate in the 2020 election, the party as a whole had failed at the 5 percent hurdle with 4.9 percent. Now she is calling for the JuLis to be rehabilitated.
In comparison, the CDU is downright harmless. However, there has recently been considerable excitement about the entry of former AfD parliamentary group and party leader Jörn Kruse into the CDU. Party leader Ploß had agreed to Kruse’s request in his district association North, of which he is also chairman, without discussing the controversial personnel in the state executive. This in turn outraged the Altona district association around its chairman and former state party leader Marcus Weinberg so much that the state executive board has now given itself rules for dealing with requests for membership from former AfD politicians.
Accordingly, the CDU Hamburg is committed to integrating people from the Christian-social, liberal and conservative milieu who identify with the basic Christian democratic values and to offering them a political home. If they come from the AfD or another extremist party, according to the decision, the personal information must be submitted to the state executive in good time so that an objection is still possible. However, those former elected officials who joined the AfD or another extremist party after the Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified them as objects of surveillance should not have access to the CDU.
The parliamentary group leader Dennis Thering is also following this path, after having distanced himself from Ploß immediately after the Kruse recording.