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?
question?
Clearly, those who most loudly shout.
Britta Haßelmann
(Bündnis90/Grünen): Or scientific freedom or cultural
freedom?
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]
