Christine Anderson, July 23, 2026, Charging Stations

EU Parliament, Strasbourg, E-003112/2026 Commission.

Written Question.

On 24 February 2026, the partly publicly-owned German energy company EnBW concluded a multiannual agreement with XCharge for high-power charging stations. EnBW operates more than 8 000 fast-charging points and plans to expand its network to up to 20 000 by 2030.

XCharge was founded in Beijing. According to its US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, its chief executive officer (CEO) and its chair/chief technology officer (CTO) control approximately 81.9 % of the voting power through Class B shares, while holding approximately 31.2 % of the share capital.

Operators of recharging points are expressly covered by the energy provisions of the Network and Information Systems (NIS 2) Directive, subject to its scope criteria. The Commission has also identified strategic dependencies, unauthorised access to operational data and remotely triggered disruptions as risks arising from connected energy equipment. It has restricted EU funding for projects using solar inverters from high-risk suppliers.

1. Beyond the general cybersecurity and supply-chain obligations under the NIS 2 Directive, does EU law require the assessment of suppliers’ ultimate control, third-country legal obligations, data access and remote software-update or maintenance capabilities?

2. Can charging equipment comply with the EU cybersecurity framework where persons exercising decisive control over the supplier retain remote-access or update capabilities and are subject to the laws of a third country presenting elevated security risks?

3. Will the Commission apply supplier-security and funding restrictions to networked charging infrastructure equivalent to those applied to solar inverters, or explain why charging networks should be treated differently?

Siegbert Frank Droese, July 9, 2026, Digital Euro

EU Parliament, Strasbourg, P10 CRE-REV(2026)07-09(4-0208-0000).

Frau President. Honorable colleagues.

The proposed legal framework for the digital euro encompasses elements such as 
obligatory acceptance regulations, the involvement of the digital identity system, 
identification mechanisms, as well as continuing interventions in payments market 
structures. Beyond that, the proposal could have considerable effects on the existing 
banking system and the structures of private investments, as well as fundamentally 
change the relation between citizens and public monetary institutions.

The totality of these elements give rise to considerable doubt that Article 133 alone
presents a sufficient legal foundation for the currently foreseen legal framework. 
The digital euro thus hides the danger to expand the range of the Union’s legal 
currency competence by means of an extensive interpretation of Article 133 beyond 
the limits foreseen in the treaties. A proposal with such wide-ranging effects on 
the payments system, market structures, the banking system and payments mechanisms
in its current form is not allowed to be supported.

[trans: tem] 

[AEUV Article 133: Without prejudice to the powers of the European Central Bank, 
the European Parliament and the Council, acting in accordance with the ordinary 

legislative procedure, shall lay down the measures necessary for the use of the euro 

as the single currency. Such measures shall be adopted after consultation of the European Central Bank.]

Alice Weidel, July 9, 2026, Industry, Budget, Free Speech

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 21/89, pp. 10882-10883.

Frau President. Herr Chancellor. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.

The Chancellor is there; I can see him back there.

Beatrix von Storch (AfD): He shuns the picture in common!

Herr Merz, since you are in office, with narrow-minded assurance you do 
the opposite of what you have promised and what would be right for this
country. 

Michael Kellner (Greens): “Narrow-minded assurance”, yet you 
know of what you speak, or?

You wanted to speak on the situation. You have not done it; for the situation
in this country is disastrous. Month by month, 15,000 industrial workplaces 
fall away. The auto industry is in a downfall. The de-industrialization turns 
into mass flight. Even Volkswagen staggers. 100,000 workplaces are on the 
verge. Suppliers and service providers fall like dominoes. Not a week without 
bad news. The German Mittelstand expends reserves. The insolvency tsunami 
expels prosperity and good jobs from Germany. Every 20 minutes a German 
firm goes bankrupt. The productive future investments have fallen to the null 
point. Germany has declined in international competition.

The ideological costs of your Politik and the Politik of your predecessors 
burden the German economy and all Germans and are no longer to be borne. 
At 6 trillion – 6,000 billion – euros estimates the economist Bernd 
Raffelhüschen the accumulated costs of the German migration policy. So 
expensive again becomes the failed energy transition if it is then executed to 
the bitter end, and nothing other than an industrial desert is left behind in 
Germany.

And the citizens and the taxpayers? They grow poor. They feel the downfall 
every day in their own pocketbook. The sozial spending explodes. It rises faster 
than the pay. Who works and pays taxes, he is the dummy torn between rising 
tax and duties costs, escalating costs for energy, housing, cost of living, and 
shrinking real incomes which everywhere do not suffice for a living. Out of 
such a situation there is only one exit: To lower the state expenditures, to 
eliminate all that is superfluous from the budget, to end the ideological wrong 
way, to leave in the citizens’ pocket more of the hard earned money, and to 
immediately liberate the economy from bureaucratic and fiscal restraints and 
immediately end the artificial increased expense and scarcity of energy. That 
is precisely what you promised the citizens before the election. You do the 
opposite. 

Instead, you deride the taxpayer with an anti-reform package which lifts the 
exploitation to the next stage. You preen yourself with a fake tax reform. You
do not relieve the taxpayer, you further burden him. You increase and discover
new taxes on tobacco, plastic, alcohol, sugar and crypto investments. You cut 
the parents money, burden families, increase the sozial contributions. Under the 
title “rich tax”, a pure tax of envy, you draw money from the pocket of the 
Mittelstand. You load the accounting for the expenditures. You one-sidedly
seek out the taxpayers and contribution payers and in addition insult them – 
they should work more and longer, not so many sick days – as complainers who 
should step aside, if you please. 

So that citizens and journalists put fewer inconvenient questions, you tighten  
the freedom of information law. You give more competences to the secret 
services and to the Constitution Protection. Ja, the fleecing and the suppression 
of the citizens and of the opposition need to conclusively proceed with the state
repression. 

And that fits that today your Ursula von der Leyen of the CDU in the EU 
Parliament wants again to have by expedited motion a vote on the total control
of the citizens, chat control, after this was rejected umpteen times. Vote until it
passes! By the total control in autos, in the chats, you thus want to control the 
citizens, while Ursula von der Leyen has deleted her Pfizer deals by SMS.

Jens Spahn (CDU/CSU): It’s about sexual abuse of children!

I say to you one thing: To you applies the saying “All men are equal, many are 
more equal”. And that exactly is your CDU Politik summed up. 

You put forward a draft budget and a finance plan which explode all limits 
of  the spending frenzy and debt-making. You thereby further finance the eco-
socialist climate protection ideology of which the rest of the world for long 
wants to know nothing more. You continue to squander billions and billions 
of  euros for useless development aid which makes BlackRock still richer and 
nourishes some profiteers and lobbyists. With your Politik, you serve not 
Germany, but perhaps secure for yourself a high paid occupation by 
connection after you have left behind nothing other than scorched earth.
You pump additional untold sums into the NGO swamp and into the migration
industry, even when its favorites sink into a morass of corruption and infidelity; 
or, like the flight assistant of the murderer of six in Stade – from the SPD – are 
entangled in criminal machinations. 

You stir up Kriegsangst, and mis-use this as a license so as to, under the pretext
 of security expenditures, let fall the last inhibitions in regards debt-making. You
drive the arms spending to astronomical heights, without that thereby something
would be won for Germany’s security. Instead, you construct a state-controlled
and -financed armaments economy as a replacement for the real industry directed 
to fundamentals – an armaments industry the products of which you donate to 
the Ukraine. 

Year by year, you want to make more than 200 billion euros in debts; that is 
one trillion euros until 2030. In the next year alone, we pay interest in the sum 
of 40 billion euros, this year 32 billion euros. This then accumulates until 2030. 
I know, you laugh, you find that funny. 

Heidi Reichinnek (Linke): We don’t laugh. We suffer. 

To 2030, we have an interest service of 80 billion euros. – Listen to yourselves, 
for you cannot deal with numbers, especially you of the SPD. You can’t do it. –
You thereby risk losing Germany’s top rating in the capital markets. Your 
financial policy drives Germany directly into state bankruptcy, and the owners, 
the citizens with homes and mortgages, into ruin. Who profits? Perhaps BlackRock
or international investors can purchase at the lowest prices the German real estate 
in the year 2029 or 2030 at the latest. There again is closed the circle for this 
Chancellor Merz.

You leave behind a heap of rubble for those who come after you. A heap of 
rubble! I can say one thing to you: We will, despite this, accept the challenge and 
do the necessary when the voters give us the mandate. 

Dirk Weise (SPD): That, they will not do!

And when everything will have been knocked kaputt by you, we will liberate the 
state budget, the sozial system and the taxpayer from unnecessary and harmful 
spending and subventions. We will cut back the rampant Staatsapparat, halt 
the mass migration into the sozial system and push the consistent deportation 
of illegals and criminals. And we will abolish the individual right to asylum! We 
will end the ideological energy transition and lower the oppressive energy costs 
and tax burden. We are ready to overtake responsibility for Germany. Finally 
make free the way for a new government!

Jens Spahn (CDU/CSU): Boring!

That is the one service which you can still do for this country, Herr Merz!

Jens Spahn (CDU/CSU): Boring! Always the same!

[trans: tem]

Mary Khan, July 8, 2026, Drug and Migrant Cartels

EU Parliament, Strasbourg, P10 CRE-REV(2026)07-08(3-0290-0000).

Herr President.

Europe stands before an explosion of drug criminality and we experience 
a record availability of illegal drugs. The EU meanwhile has overtaken 
the U.SA. as the largest cocaine market, and at Eurojust [European Agency
for Criminal Justice Cooperation] the number of cases in only five years – 
only five years – has risen 60 percent; drugs worth 20 billion euros were 
seized. More than half of Europe’s most dangerous criminal networks are 
active in drug smuggling, two-thirds employ violence, over 70 percent use 
corruption so as to influence officials and port personnel.

This is no longer a side issue; this is a security policy total failure. Europol
itself states: The networks which smuggle drugs to Europe are largely the 
same criminal structures which also organize illegal migration and 
human trafficking. The cartels have long since understood: Europe’s 
open borders and its political coddling is their business model.

Our ports may no longer be gateways for drug cartels, and our borders 
may no longer be business models for traffickers. The solution is simple, 
that is to say: Secure exterior borders, destroy trafficking networks and 
stop illegal migration. 

[trans: tem]

Tino Chrupalla, July 9, 2026, Merz Government II

German Bundestag, July 9, 2026, Plenarprotokoll 21/89, pp. 10868-10871.

[...] Let us come to healthcare reform and to the first day illness note, Herr 
Chancellor. And here again becomes clear that you really have null empathy,  
primarily for the citizens. Were such a proposal submitted by me and us, I 
would place myself before the voters. You however are full of mistrust and 
ill will in the face of the sick. Much more, you would thereby still further 
strain the already thin medical coverage. There are now full waiting rooms and 
long lines at the doctors' offices. There is actually shown that you apparently
do not at all know what proceeds out there in the country: Full waiting rooms, 
as was said, added to that the documentation obligations, overburdened health 
personnel; these then need to wait in line at the nearest doctor's office for an 
illness note. 

Herr Merz, such unmenschliche proposals will only be represented by politicians
who themselves seemingly never worked with the hands, but only have controlled
foreign capital from a manager's seat as an upper employee. 

Jens Spahn (CDU/CSU): Does that apply to Frau Weidel?

Please do not get me wrong: I rejoice for everyone who in his calling is successful
and earns money. Those citizens who even perhaps came somewhat easier through 
these difficult times will nevertheless even so be burdened by your unpleasant 
approach to Politik.  

Wherein we also see you generally plan new costs. Just in the health field, the 
chronically ill and families will be burdened with the greatest costs - be it the reduced 
subvention for dental replacement, the obligatory costs of co-insurance for spouses, 
the rising costs for pharmacists, or the financing of gaps in the rescue service. All that 
damages the provision for young and old, their health and the attractiveness of our 
country. You drive with these measures remaining medical professionals out of the 
country. You worsen the health of middle- and low-earners - this is besides the 
majority of the citizens in Germany - the retirees and, before all, the future generations. 
Herr Merz, you also ever more leave the way of the sozial market economy. The bow 
is more quickly over-stretched than you actually think. 

The Alternative fur Deutschland is also here in position to build bridges, for the market regulates much in the area "Business and Economy". In the area of basic duties of the 

state, like health, education and infrastructure, or affordable energy, we in Germany see 

the state obliged. The people primarily need again to be at the center of Sozialpolitik, 

those who have contributed to creation of value and are also plainly active and will be active: Those are our children. With them stands and falls a sozial system. It thus can 

conclusively only be about using the savings potential of 12 billion euros in the area 
of Bürgergeld contributions for precisely this group of persons, so as to bring into 
employment all, namely those who are capable of work and are of corresponding 
age and thereby ending the state incentives for tax-financed non-work.

This concerns even so the immigrants into our sozial system, primarily from the 
Ukraine and from Syria, as precisely those who simply no longer want to 
work because they have settled themselves. Only with a strong focus may we 
strengthen the sozial accounts and, before all things, the community. We thus 
need to take in hand quite clear limitations and also formulate severe penalties 
for benefits abuse. These are exactly the important signs to the majority of 
citizens that thereby their hard work and willingness to perform again pays.
Germany can thus also again become family- and children-friendly. Like a 
thunderclap then the news of the planned cuts in the parents money hit all 
young families. You have spoken of families and children, Herr Merz. I am 
astonished that you at all formulated that. Yet which signs do these cuts send? 
What is this actually for priorities of this Federal  government? We have in 
Germany meanwhile the lowest birthrate since 1946. And what comes from 
this government, what pertains to family policy, what pertains to promotion?
Nothing. Null. That is really a disgrace for this country.

This Federal government wants to obligate everyone up to the 70th year of 
life to work, and invest preferably in panzers instead of children. It will play 
off the generations one against the other, and in the end commit the valuable 
tax money to none of either side.

You want the control of conflicts and wars not through diplomacy but through  
sanctions. These damage the German economy, the German people and the entire
European continent. Peace means prosperity, and prosperity is the basis of
security. 

Yet with horror I need see that you want to achieve the prosperity at the cost 
of peace. Massive upgrades and armament have nothing to do with the mandatory
fulfillment of alliance obligations. In the past twelve months, the spending for war 
weapons increased about 25 billion to over 124 billion euros. You regularly
celebrate your armaments intoxications, and have no one who wants to take up 
arms. The Federal Minister of Defense, Pistorius, needed to painfully experience
that following the reaction to approximately 300,000 questionnaires sent for 
military registration - merely a scarce 530 reports for voluntary service followed.

Beatrix von Storch (AfD): Hear, hear!

The German people quite obviously no longer want to have themselves made 
fit for war.

And the young generation has decided. The time of the War Minister is past. In 
place of being employed in the construction of a destructive war economy, there
needs finally again be at midpoint an impulse for a peaceful living together between
the peoples of Europe. The NATO could be an alliance of peace, and not the finance
machine of the Ukraine war.

For a conclusion, yet a brief remark on law, and on the obligation of parties for 
holding their party meetings. We are all legally obligated to the same conduct. Just so 
more reprehensible are the calls for violence of individual members of this sovereign 
house who have exchanged democracy for the right of might. We could see in Erfurt
who these are, who ostensibly defend our democracy. They of course have 
contributed to that Apollo journalists were victims of uncontrolled assaults and the 
split in our society was driven ever deeper. The security measures for our national
party meeting in Erfurt cost many weeks of preparation time by police and Bund 
security forces. I want in this place to state to all mission forces my express thanks. 

President Julia Klöckner: Please come to a final sentence.

Dialogue and diplomacy are also the basis for security and prosperity.

Many thanks.

[trans: tem]

Volker Schnurrbusch, July 9, 2026, Humanitarian Aid

EU Parliament, Strasbourg, P10 CRE-REV(2026) 07-09(4-0019-0000). 

Her President. Frau Commissioner. Ladies and gentlemen. 

The less real influence the EU has worldwide, the more it portrays itself 

as a moral great power. Nothing against assistance in acute emergency 

situations and the protection of humanitarian personnel, but your resolution 

wants to make of humanitarian policy a permanent instrument in the 

billions with its own implementation architecture and sprawling political 

obligations.

It's always the same pattern: The Greens demand in the Bundestag three billion
euros, yet as long as in Germany bridges decay, hospitals suffer a personnel
emergency and retirees need to gather deposit bottles, such an application is 
simply inappropriate. 

And what happens with the money? In Yemen, the GIZ [Society for International
Cooperation] for years misappropriated German aid money - manipulated accounts,
gang-organized fraud, two-figure millions in damages which here will be further 
reinforced: The financing of NGOs and oftentimes corrupt regimes without we 
in Europe gaining something from it.

And where in the world our aid shows good results, it is often others who profit
from it. China manages its development policy strictly geo-strategic, and 
exclusively for its own uses. If Europe does not want to be the useful idiot who 
prepares the field for China's investments, then this claim to saving the world 
needs to stop.

Humanitarian aid - yes, but oriented to need and strictly controlled. It is not 
allowed to be considered isolated from the other development policy. We require
conditionality: Who wants our means needs to cooperate in regards, for example, 
fighting illegal migration. The blank check for global NGOs and endless transfers, 
which the left half of this house into the EVP demands, that is a sell-out of 
European interests and thus we reject this resolution motion. 

[trans: tem]