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The CDU chairman Armin Laschet has rejected comparisons of the mask affair with the donation affair of ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

"That's absurd," he said on Thursday at an online event by the "Handelsblatt".

Establishing a connection between the two processes, “that doesn't work at all,” emphasized the North Rhine-Westphalian Prime Minister.

"These comparisons are really unacceptable."

The current case, in which two MPs “did business in a medical emergency”, had “zero point” to do with the fact that “a CDU party leader who was also Federal Chancellor” did not properly record donations, said Laschet.

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After the end of his tenure, Kohl had admitted that he had not reported donations to the CDU of more than two million D-Marks in the statement of accounts for years.

Kohl refused to give the names of the donors publicly because he had given them his word of honor.

Laschet sharply criticized the MPs Georg Nüßlein (previously CSU) and Nikolas Löbel (previously CDU), who have since left the parties.

He could not have imagined such a low moral inhibition threshold to do such a thing.

He could not rule out further cases.

"But I can rule out that the CDU of Germany, that the leadership, that 400,000 members have anything to do with these crooked paths of some colleagues," said Laschet.

The head of the Union parliamentary group gave the members of the CDU and CSU in the mask affair a deadline of Friday evening to submit a kind of declaration of honor.

Ziemiak: "Misconduct by Individuals"

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CDU General Secretary Paul Ziemiak feared major damage to the image of his party.

"The events have shaken our party, our members are just as angry as Armin Laschet and I," said Ziemiak on Wednesday of the Düsseldorf "Rheinische Post".

"It is about the misconduct of individual people." He refuses to "take the many committed and sincere into kin".

Ziemiak emphasized that hundreds of thousands of people volunteered in the CDU and that there were thousands of elected officials.

“These individual cases hit us all, make us angry and embarrassed.” The CDU politician did not want to draw a comparison with the party donation affair: “The party donation affair in the 1990s was a completely different issue, and back then it was not about individual cases.

Nevertheless, the image damage is great these days. "

The deputy chairman of the Union parliamentary group, Carsten Linnemann, called for a reform of the law on parliament because of the mask scandal.

"It must be ruled out that you get money for activities that have to do with the parliamentary mandate," said Linnemann of the "image".

These included lobby fees, but also fees for speeches and newspaper articles.

“The taxpayer pays for politics and nobody else, otherwise you get dependent.

Violations must be clearly sanctioned in the law, ”demanded Linnemann.

In a representative survey by the opinion research institute Civey on behalf of the “Augsburger Allgemeine”, 92 percent of those questioned said that the Union politicians involved in the mask affair should repay the commissions they received.

Only five percent of those questioned refused, four percent were undecided.

Among the Union and FDP supporters, 88 percent each voted for the repayment, with the Greens, SPD and Left over 94 percent, among AfD supporters 90 percent.