CDU Fears Party Rift Over Anti-Semitism Scandal

Martin Hohmann has been reprimanded by party leadership, he's been ordered to give up his seat on the influential Domestic Affairs Committee in the German parliament and instead has been moved to the Environmental Committee. He's also been given an ultimatum by his party: cease with the anti-Semitic remarks or face expulsion.

But that's about as far as party leadership is willing to go at the moment -- out of fear that excluding him could create a huge rift within the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Germany's leading opposition party.

In the members' forum on the party's Web site, postings include comments critical of the CDU's failure to expel Hohmann. But there are also those who say that Hohmann's remarks, made in a speech in early October, were taken out of context and that the parliamentarian simply expressed the thoughts of many Germans. An army general who had voiced similar feelings about Hohmann's viewpoints was fired from his job last week.

Party defends decision to keep Hohmann

For more than a week now, the CDU's leadership has been struggling to decide how best to deal with the parliamentarian. Soon after Hohmann's comments became public, party leader Angela Merkel apparently consider banishing him from the CDU's parliamentary group, according to the newsmagazine Der Spiegel.

But other party leaders warned Merkel that Hohmann could no longer be controlled after that. While condemning Hohmann's remarks, the CDU leadership appears to want to deal with any reprimand of Hohmann internally.

"We have taken a clear and necessary step but we also consider it to be sufficient," Laurenz Meyer, the party's secretary general, said in a television talk show on Sunday, referring to reprimanding Hohmann and moving him over to the environmental beat.

Hohmann's comments were "unspeakable" and "intolerable," Meyer said. But, he added, Hohmann was definitely not a anti-Semite "in the narrow sense" but rather a "fundamentalist in his views on the church." Besides, expelling Hohmann from the party could take years.

Roland Koch, the Christian Democratic premier of the central German state of Hesse, where Hohmann is from, defended the party's decision not to expel the parliamentarian while taking steps to distance himself from Hohmann's anti-Semitic remarks. Koch did so during a speech at a Frankfurt synagogue, causing more than a quarter of the audience to leave the room.

Bavarian Permier Edmund Stoiber, who heads the CDU's sister party, the Christian Social Union, said Hohmann's actions would be closely observed from now on. "He's on the strictest kind of probation," Stoiber said. "One more remark like that and it will be impossible for him to remain within the party."

Growing calls to expel Hohmann

Others have instead called upon the CDU to get rid of Hohmann. Germany's Social Democratic interior minister, Otto Schily, said he expected the CDU to conclude that "anyone agitating such a brown sauce again" should be expelled from its parliamentary group.

Jewish leaders expressed similar feelings. "It's intolerable, not only for those belonging to a minority, that someone who spreads right extremist ideas has a seat and a voice in the German parliament," Paul Spiegel, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said on Sunday.

Even within the CDU, some are starting to say that Hohmann will have to go. "If he doesn't take the step himself, the parliamentary group and the party has to let him go," Dieter Althaus, the premier of the eastern German state of Thuringia, told the German wire service DPA.