Kay Gottschalk, June 27, 2019, Abolition of Property Tax

Kay Gottschalk

Abolition of Property Tax

German Bundestag, June 27, 2019, Plenarprotokoll 19/107, pp. 13107-13108

[Kay Gottschalk is an Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from the western German state of Nordrhein-Westfalen. A former member of the SPD, he is an insurance manager and an Odd Fellow. He here responds to proposals for property tax reform presented by the government and the Linke party.]

Right honorable Herr President. Dear ladies and gentlemen. Dear colleagues.

All motions and speeches – for which I first of all wish to express thanks – have indicated one thing: the property tax must go. It is unreformable and socially unjust.

I want to clarify the highlights of some of the wonderful motions, primarily those of the Linke. One motion consists of half a page – for all that, it is exactly so empty of content – and shows the hundred year mental pause of the Linke; I gladly wish to include the Greens and the SPD in that. The Linke – I quote – want “to eliminate the property tax assessment” of rent “in the operating cost regulation”.

Britta Haßelmann (Bündnis90/Grünen): How can one say, “The property tax must be immediately done away with”? Say that to the local governments [Kommunen]. A loss of 15 billion euros! That’s what the AfD wants!

You plainly said it already. In Germany it comes to 19 percent per square meter. Ladies and gentlemen, do you earnestly believe that this elimination or your ineffective rental price control does anything whatever? No! The landlords will include it in the cost of the cold rent. You plainly have no idea of the market economy; that is also a core problem of the SPD. You perhaps think that in your red Cloud Cuckoo Land; but you have bad luck when it comes to thinking. Once more: the landlords will shift it.

Stefan Schmidt (Bündnis90/Grünen): For once present what you do for rental price control!

Yet at least the motion suits your red and dead mentality. All who have property and produce, namely the providers [Leistungsträger] – for you, that is a foreign word – are, for you, cash cows. He who first orders construction of housing, who is he then? That is the investors and the owners. Your housing and rental space does not fall from heaven. It appears that you think so; it is not so. On that account, to be able to administer social justice, we must abolish the property tax. Since what is more social?

Ladies and gentlemen, if you really want to relieve the citizens out there, attend to the AfD motion and abolish the property tax. Anyone here in Berlin who has a 50 square meter dwelling on the average pays some 25 euros per month alone for the property tax over the incidental costs. When we rid them of that then they fight with 25 euros more per month. That brings more than any law on tax alteration that we here pass. The family relief law does not bring 10 euros. Ladies and gentlemen, we bring them 25 euros per month. We are the only rent reduction party and therefore the only social party remaining here in Germany.

Matthias W. Birkland (Linke): What then is your financing proposal? How do you want to finance it? For once say it. How do you want to equalize the tax loss?

We come to the so-called draft law of the GroKo [present coalition government of CDU/CSU and SPD]. They want to again introduce property tax C. Ladies and gentlemen, that is likewise something of a relic which already has failed once. It corresponds to an almost leftist power of thought.

            Matthias W. Birkland (Linke): Which can still learn!

Ladies and gentlemen of the CDU, are you not properly ashamed of yourselves to wish so soon to yet again introduce such a reptile? At the end of the day you again yield to Bavarian interests, wishing an opening clause. You thereby make all the ladies and gentlemen there outside even more insecure. You will again fail before the constitutional court and then your Kommunen – I do not wish to be a Bürgermeister there – must replace all of the tax obligations. That is your solid, hand-made policy. You are incapable of reform. As my colleague Albert Glaser has already said: This law is botched! Therefore, please support our motion.

            Matthias W. Birkland (Linke): Under no circumstance!

What you present here is a real patchwork rug. What you present here is a legal mess. It will not succeed. On these grounds, ladies and gentlemen, my delegation will not agree to this thoroughly unreasoned, unsocial, administratively bloated law for property tax reform. Better to support us before you land anew in front of the constitutional court, and that I forecast.

Thank you.

[Translated by Todd Martin]

Alice Weidel, May 16, 2019, 70th Anniversary Basic Law

Alice Weidel

70th Anniversary Basic Law

German Bundestag, May 16, 2019, Plenarprotokoll 19/101, pp. 12156-12157

[Alice Weidel is a chairman of the Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag delegation.]

The Basic Law [Grundgesetz] of the Federal Republic of Germany is a sound foundation for German democracy. It was a blessing of history that in a difficult time a new beginning could have been attempted which is in the best tradition of German constitutional history and the German freedom movement.

This inheritance obligates us to an attentiveness. A generally justified pride does not permit us to be content that the rights and principles, for long successfully secured in Germany by the Grundgesetz, have been fulfilled. It has weaknesses but primarily dangers threaten it. They are earnest, since they come from those who most loudly display themselves as its defender. That ultimately the literal constitution and the actual constitution ever further diverge from one another is an alarm signal.

            Britta Haßelmann (Bündnis90/Grünen): Who then places religious freedom in 
            question?

Clearly, those who most loudly shout.

            Britta Haßelmann (Bündnis90/Grünen): Or scientific freedom or cultural 
            freedom?

We stand on fragile ground. The prosperity upon which the inner cohesion of society is based, under cover of the Grundgesetz, is in acute danger of erosion. Tens of thousands of productive industrial work places are indeed being devastatingly lost, by automakers and supply industries, by chemical and pharmaceutical firms, by energy suppliers and power station builders, Mittlestand and concerns.  Politics is exhilarated by statistics, the high employment numbers sweet talk the stagnating economic growth. Pizza sales, package deliveries and bicycle couriers are however no replacement for the productive work places which first create the prosperity which the social state distributes. The politically compelled reconstruction of Germany from a place of high performance industry to a land of low wages destroys the economic substance which keeps the social state running and the established requirement of the social state of Article 20 of the Grundgesetz thereby also becomes a dead letter and empty husk.

           

That is the result of a false government policy. In German post-war history, the administration of Chancellor Angela Merkel will be bound by the stigma of three striking failures: the “euro rescue” policy which ignored national and European law and willfully flouted the right of sovereignty of the people and their representatives, the “energy and auto transformation” which arbitrarily ignored the rights of ownership and the migration crisis, unresolved to the present day, which by continual violation of Article 16a of the Grundgesetz, effectively and in one dimension acquiesced to illegal immigration via secure third states and which will alter, for long and dramatically, the integrity of the sovereign, the people of the state. Thereby have you, right honorable Frau Chancellor, done heavy damage to our legal and constitutional order.

Michael Grosse Brömer (CDU/CSU): The federal constitutional court sees that otherwise.

Concerning all of that, the people, the sovereign, were not once asked. And that is one of the undeniable weaknesses of our Grundgesetz: the mistrust of the citizen, right honorable ladies and gentlemen. After the reunification during the 1990s, the opportunity to correct this weakness was wasted. The order which the Grundgesetz itself in Article 146 had issued, namely that the entire German people in free self-determination should give themselves a new constitution, was not fulfilled. Instead of by the entire German people, the reunification was completed by the straightened decision of the people’s chamber of a declining DDR. The thereby rendered obsolete Article 123, after the accession of the mitteldeutschen federal states –

            (Cries from the SPD): “Mitteldeutschen”?

- was of a model precision. It was replaced with a new Article 123 which declared the further development of the European Union to be an aim of the state yet in its numerous paragraphs gave neither the people nor its representatives the last word, but for the Bundestag and the Bundesrat carved out only a right of “statement”; thus, in fact a loss of sovereignty and an article which in one instance among others will be exploited as a carte blanche for a wide-ranging transfer of sovereign rights. Here exists unquestionably a need for improvement. Since it is clear: each constitution, even the best, requires continual further development. Thereby, the more precise a constitutional text, the greater its authority. On the other hand, the more detailed the regulations, the greater the danger of narrowing and dilution.

Attention to the spirit of the Grundgesetz bids the trustworthy to be more acutely worked out, the antiquated to be adjusted and the anachronistic to be struck off. That means, for example, to replace the hundreds of thousands of instances of the misuse of the basic individual right to demand asylum with an institutional guarantee with simplified regulation. That means an end to the everlasting, crippling court procedures for those who are obligated to be deported. That means stipulating to German as the state speech which for 70 years would appear to have been self-evident. And that means to finally anchor plebiscite and referendum on the federal level in the constitution, and thereby return the German people’s right of self-determination to its proper place.

[Translated by Todd Martin]

Alexander Gauland, Aachen Treaty, May 16, 2019

Alexander Gauland

Aachen Treaty

German Bundestag, May 16, 2019, Plenarprotokoll 19/101, p. 12291

[Alexander Gauland is a national chairman of the Alternative für Deutschland as well as a chairman of the AfD delegation in the German Bundestag.]

Today we are debating the Aachen Treaty between Germany and France for German-French Cooperation and Integration. It contains much diplomatic word play and many good intentions, none of which is my theme.

Of all themes, ours must be the assistance obligation defined in Article 14 in which both treaty partners oblige themselves, in case of attack upon their sovereign territory [Hoheitsgebiete], to render to one another every assistance and support in their power, including military means. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a novelty in regards the Élysée Treaty of 1963, commended as a model, and it creates a new obligation in addition to that of the NATO Treaty’s Article 5 assistance clause.

The entirety is thus not only more than symbol politics and border crossing but it reaches territory beyond the NATO obligation. This is acknowledged to be confined according to Article 6 of the NATO Treaty to territory north of the Tropic of Cancer, while the new obligation extends to the French overseas departments south of this line. Now, this could be dismissed as a bagatelle, -

            Alexander Lambsdorff (FDP): Indeed!

- as a case which will never arise, were it not for an additional insecurity, the inclusion of French nuclear weapons. It was not stated what was meant that they were not be included in the assistance obligation. It is however difficult to conceive that France for its own defense relinquishes its so expensive force de frappe. Yet what does that mean for Germany and its renunciation of atomic weapons? All is obscure.

Ladies and gentlemen, military assistance concerns the right of existence of a state. Size and territorial extent must therefore be defined free of doubt and deficiencies of interpretation are to be avoided, else there is a danger of sleep-walking into military adventure. For that, European history unfortunately provides sufficient examples. However, ladies and gentlemen, we must be concerned with something other. Each new bi-lateral promise of assistance weakens the multilateral NATO union, which alone, by means of the American anchor, guarantees Germany’s defense capability.

The privileged partnership with France, the two-speed EU, is unfortunately a symptom of diplomatic failure. Besides Macron, the Chancellor apparently has no more allies for her diplomatic goals. After three years of Trump bashing by German politicians and media, the alienation of America is complete. On account of Brexit, we are detached from the British. The east Europeans have had enough of being school-mastered by Germany. The relations with Russia are as bad as can be imagined. What a sad sum.

Ladies and gentlemen, reckoned according to a federal government which gladly enthuses over rule-based multilateralism, this weakens what has worked for 70 years. For that very reason, we maintain that this German-French agreement is not a good idea and will not vote for it. I would be glad should the Herr State Minister enter into the defense question and not just gush that borders can now be crossed. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

            Christian Petry (SPD): What has he said?

[Translated by Todd Martin]