Martin Hohmann - Political Consequences

Political Consequences

The speech was delivered to 120 people in his constituency on October 3. It attracted no attention until it was later found on the internet. This led to a lively debate in public and in the CDU, and after Hohmann refused to retract the speech, he was expelled from the parliamentary group of the CDU in the Bundestag in 2003 and from the party itself in 2004. The former decision, however, came only after almost two weeks, on November 15, raising some concerns that the party did not share the zeal of his critics. CDU MPs voted 195 to 28 (16 abstained) to eject him from the party group, that is 81 percent favored ejection. According to The Independent, support for free speech was far higher than expected. Hohmann appealed the party decision in court, but his expulsion was upheld. The Kammergericht Berlin ruled that the accusation that Hohmann "supported antisemitic tendencies as his own or in any case facilitated them in parts of the audience by providing facts for such appraisal" was in line with the core statements of the speech.

While most of the German elite was unanimous in condemning Hohmann, the public was much less convinced - polls indicated that equally many opposed the expulsion as those who approved of it (a little over 40 percent in each camp). Although party spokesmen were quick to condemn the speech, some party leaders said in private conversations that Hohmann did not deserve to be expelled. BBC explained the sentiment in Germany by observing that "any criticism of Jewish people is still a taboo in Germany, which makes this incident extremely embarrassing for Mr Hohmann's party". The decision to expel him met severe criticism from party rank-and-files. CDU officials in the Ruhr town of Recklinghausen joined the protests by displaying a banner from the local party office. It read: "Nobody in Germany is allowed to tell the truth any more".

He kept his seat as an independent member of parliament until the next Bundestag election of 2005. There, Hohmann run unsuccessfully for a seat as an independent candidate. He received 21,5 percent of the votes, an exceptionally high number for an independent candidate.