Hans-Georg Maassen was once Germany’s top Nazi hunter, but now the conservative opposition wants to oust the former head of internal security from the party for anti-Semitic and racist clichés, Reuters reports.

Until 2018, Maassen headed the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, tracking extremist threats to Germany’s constitutional order, whether from foreign spies, religious fundamentalists, the far right or the far left.

But a long-time member of the Christian Democratic Union lost his job after he was accused of ignoring video evidence of far-right groups hunting immigrants during protests.

Now, after Maassen commented in an interview on “the racial theory of the green left” which sees whites as inferior and promotes “immigration of Arab and African men”, the CDU has lost patience with the man who continued to deliver a speech full of racist clichés.

“He continues to use language from the world of anti-Semitism and conspiracy theorists, even the terminology of ethnic supremacy,” the CDU president said in a statement on Monday, giving him until Sunday to leave the party or face expulsion.

Maassen criticized the ad for the conservative newspaper Die Welt. “What I said wasn’t racist, that’s what a lot of people think,” he said. “I reject ideological positions that call for the extinction of ‘white bread’ – those with white skin – through mass immigration.”

To the right of the center, but more to the center than the extremes – the dilemma of the CDU

The decision to expel Maassen, four years after he first rose to prominence, underscores the dilemma facing the CDU, which has a narrow lead in the polls over Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats and Greens but risks throwing voters to the far-right opposition Alternative. for Germany.

New CDU leader Friedrich Merz has charted a more right-wing path for the party than the famously centrist Merkel, criticizing the government’s plans for more generous immigration and citizenship policies as a “devaluation” of German citizenship.

If Maassen does not leave the party himself, the expulsion process could be long. Under Germany’s party democracy laws, introduced to prevent the re-emergence of dictatorial parties like Hitler’s Nazis, expulsion can only happen after a series of quasi-judicial hearings to determine whether a member of the party is in conflict with its values.

Maassen told Die Welt that there was no legal basis for his expulsion.