Alexander
Gauland
55th
Anniversary Élysée Treaty
German
Bundestag, January 22, 2018, Plenarprotokoll 19/9, pp. 691-692
[Alexander Gauland is a national chairman of the Alternative für Deutschland as well as a chairman of the AfD delegation in the Bundestag. Martin Schulz is a member of the SDP and a former president of the European Parliament.]
Mr.
President. Ladies and gentlemen. Worthy French guests. Dear colleagues.
55
years Élysée Treaty: That is neither a salient fact nor a round anniversary
justifying the attendant expenses, either here or in Paris.
Yet,
ladies and gentlemen of the CDU/CSU, SPD, FDP and Greens, for you this is not
about this treaty and not even about German-French reconciliation. For you,
this is an arbitrary occasion to ring in the United States of Europe,
proclaimed by Herr Schulz. For this purpose you pervert an event and the name
of a great Frenchman to an end to which he was opposed. For, dear
colleagues, de Gaulle did not at all want the United States of Europe; since he
believed in nations, first in the great French and then in the great German.
During
his famous visit to Germany in 1962, he said at the Bonn market place (I was
able as a quite young man to be there):
When
I see you all gathered around me, when I listen to your pronouncements,
I feel more strongly than before the worth and trustworthiness which I cherish
in your great people, yes, the great German people.
I feel more strongly than before the worth and trustworthiness which I cherish
in your great people, yes, the great German people.
Words
that all you who sit here, us excepted, would no longer use, ladies and
gentlemen. On this account is this celebratory hour of the parliamentary
session simply a hypocrisy. That began with the exclusion of two parties of
this house from the preparations and does not end with the useless flight to
Paris, in which we will naturally not take part. And, ladies and gentlemen, we
will vote for no resolution which has been indifferently passed over our heads.
Yes,
in the resolution of the Linke is there much that can be subscribed to, but on
the whole, we reject it.
Yes,
ladies and gentlemen, the Élysée Treaty had and has a lofty desire, the
reconciliation of two peoples who have been fighting one another since the end
of the Middle Ages. And, yes, we in the AfD are for this reconciliation. But as
de Gaulle had wanted it: as a union of nations and not as a supernational
Europe.
De Gaulle
was a passionate patriot who wanted to make his country and people the greatest
and strongest in Europe which, since Waterloo, it no longer was. For the French
grandeur he sought German political and economic support.
When
the strife in Bonn between the Atlanticists and the Gaullists contributed to a
preamble being added to this treaty which for European unification emphasized
the inclusion of Britain and an association with America, and prepared an
outcome for this calculation, he was most deeply disillusioned and for many
years the Élysée Treaty wasted away in the diplomatic files.
Ladies
and gentlemen, when you re-interpret it as a charter for a supernational
Europe, the Poles, Hungarians and Czechs may with difficulty follow you
therein. But the Franco-German friendship is much to important for the AfD and
for me to instrumentalize it as a seed of discord in Europe. I am grateful.
