Protective mask issue: Löbel retires from politics

The second union politician ends his political career over the issue of the masks. CDU MP Löbel will not run for the Bundestag again. He had received a commission of 250,000 euros for managing the purchase of masks.

The member of the CDU of the Bundestag Nikolas Löbel is retiring from politics in the course of the affair with the acquisition of crown masks. Löbel announced that he would resign from his mandate in the Bundestag at the end of August and would no longer run for the next Bundestag.

At the same time, he will cease to be a member of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group immediately. “I take responsibility for my actions and draw the necessary political consequences.” The union politician emphasized that with his actions he violated the claims to his offices. “For this I would like to apologize to all the citizens of this country.”

Commission of 250,000 euros

Löbel had admitted his involvement in business with protective corona masks on Friday. Löbel’s company received commissions of around 250,000 euros because it negotiated mask purchase contracts between a supplier in Baden-Württemberg and two private companies in Heidelberg and Mannheim. Later, Löbel admitted mistakes, but initially only withdrew from the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Bundestag.

But that was not enough for his critics, even within the Union. Over the weekend, the pressure on Löbel to draw more personal conclusions on the matter increased sharply again at the CDU and CSU. A week before the state elections in Baden-Wuerttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, the main CDU candidate from the Southwest, Susanne Eisenmann, told ZDF: “If the mandate was used to carry out this sale, this brokering, then the Resignation is necessary immediately. “The Junge Union demanded that members of the Union who have become rich from the pandemic be expelled from the parliamentary group if necessary.

Nüßlein also finished his career

Previously, CSU member Georg Nüßlein had already announced his retirement from federal politics due to corruption investigations against him. He is also said to have benefited from commissions of up to 600,000 euros for the repair of masks.

FDP wants investigation committee

To clarify the matter, the FDP calls for a parliamentary commission of inquiry. That committee was “the inevitable necessity of the moment,” said FDP parliamentary group vice chairman Michael Theurer. Some time ago he “stopped dealing with individual cases or simply being scammed by MPs from the CDU and CSU.” “The credibility of the federal government, and indeed of the German state itself, is fundamentally at stake,” Theurer explained.

The chairman of the left-wing parliamentary group in the Bundestag, Dietmar Bartsch, also harshly criticized Löbel. The fact that he has decided “to resign from the Bundestag mandate for six months obviously has to do with pension rights. It remains a benefit optimizer.”

Criticism of the group itself

The deputy head of the Union’s parliamentary group, Andreas Jung, expressed a similar opinion. He urged his friend from the CDU party and compatriot from Baden-Württemberg to resign from his parliamentary mandate immediately and not until the end of August. “Here the parliamentary mandate was used to win high commissions with this crisis,” Jung said of the “Stuttgarter Zeitung”. No understanding could be found for this. Therefore, he asked Löbel “to immediately resign from his mandate in the German Bundestag.”