In August 1990 the East German CDU (party) formally merged back into the West German CDU from which it had been forcibly separated by the post-war division of Germany, and Hans Joachim Meyer took the opportunity to rejoin the party from which, out of "disappointment over the party's limited political options", he had resigned in 1961. Directly following reunification he joined the regional government of Kurt Biedenkopf in Saxony, serving between November 1990 and May 2002 as .