The CDU chairman Friedrich Merz sees no more room in his party for the new chairman of the Value Union, Hans-Georg Maassen.
"This is the limit.
We asked Mr. Maassen to leave the party.
Excluding a party is not easy, but we are currently examining carefully what options we have," said Merz of "Bild am Sonntag".
Maassen's language and ideas no longer have a place in the CDU.
The former president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Maassen, was elected chairman of the arch-conservative Union of Values on Saturday.
The grouping is not an official union association.
It claims to have around 4,000 members.
For years, Maaßen - a member of the Thuringian CDU - has repeatedly caused controversy with controversial statements.
In the past few days he had again come under heavy criticism.
In a tweet he claimed that the thrust of the "driving forces in the political and media space" was "eliminatory racism against whites".
In an interview he spoke of a "red-green racial theory".
As a result, several CDU politicians called on him to leave the party or threatened to apply to be expelled from the party.
In the "Bild am Sonntag" Merz also moved away from his previous resolution of wanting to halve the AfD.
"I have not repeated this statement since 2018," said the CDU leader.
“The extremist structures and the far-right rhetoric in the AfD are solidifying.
The AfD stands firmly on Russia's side and is mobilizing primarily in East Germany," said Merz.
He has by no means given up his claim to win back voters from the AfD.
"But we will steadfastly stick to the Union's course of clearly demarcating ourselves to the far right," emphasized Merz.
"We can only reach AfD voters to a very limited extent at the moment," he added.