NRW minister Liminski urges Left Party to carry out “political purges”
Wüst’s chief of staff uses drastic language against the Left Party before the Young Union, with a term evoking Stalin’s terror. The backdrop is government formation in Berlin.
Archive image · Photo: Martin Kraft / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
North Rhine-Westphalia minister Nathanael Liminski (CDU) called on the Left Party to carry out “political purges” in its own ranks at the Young Union’s Deutschlandtag convention in Bonn. “Jew-haters and friends of clans should not be treated with some kind of self-help groups,” the head of the Düsseldorf state chancellery said, according to dpa. Anyone who does not expel such members is “a case for the Office for the Protection of the Constitution” and has no place in a government, he said. Liminski is regarded as an influential strategist and a close confidant of State Premier Hendrik Wüst.
Liminski pointed to the Left Party’s “origins in Stalinism.” The term is historically loaded: purges refer above all to the waves of persecution under Joseph Stalin, whose “Great Terror” took place from 1936 to 1938. Liminski added: “Morally superior cranks are making themselves the useful idiots of hard-core extremists.” The dpa report did not cite any response from the Left Party.
The occasion is government formation in Berlin, where the Left Party, the Greens and the SPD concluded exploratory talks on Saturday and are recommending coalition negotiations. The talks were overshadowed by allegations of antisemitism against individual Left Party members; the Berlin Left Party has since distanced itself from lawmaker Vanessa Emde, who had shared controversial statements about Israel. Chancellor Merz had previously warned the SPD and the Greens against talks with the Left Party.