Alice Weidel, November 26, 2020, Pandemic

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 19/195, pp. 24569-24571.

Right honorable Herr President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.

The collateral damages of your Corona policy are now already greater than the damages caused by the virus itself. The greatest damages you have inflicted on our economy, our Mittelstand and our legal and constitutional order by means of the third – so-called – population defense law. In record-breaking haste, you have permitted yourself to write out a blank check for a fundamental and incisive infringement of basic rights.

            Christian Lindner (FDP): We had discussed that last week!

In opposition to that last week the people held a demonstration, which you rubbed out with water cannons and violence – a low point for the democratic composition of our state.

            Ralph Brinkhaus (CDU/CSU): Certainly the law-breaking has been                                        brought here by you!

Emergency measures must clarify, be able to be examined, and follow strictly limited criteria, and be subjected to close, parliamentary control. You however have simply written your dubious measures into a law which thereby enables you to continue as before, unannoyed by the courts. The parliament from now on is an on-looker.

Thus again, unforeseen by the constitution, a round of wheeling and dealing from the Chancellor’s office and the Minister-presidents has met in the virtual backrooms and this round has again negotiated decisions which encroach deeply upon the lives and rights of citizens and businesses. What you demand of the citizens is inconsistent, contradictory, of dubious utility, and is saturated with an undemocratic spirit of a state-authoritarian patronization.  

It is simply no concern of the state when and whom one meets in his private quarters and with whom and in which surroundings someone celebrates Christmas with family, neighbors or close friends. That is improper, that is intrusive.

Do you really not understand how condescending and insulting it is for grown, mature citizens when the state plays the nanny and itself presumes to graciously allot what shall still be allowed during the holidays and what shall be forbidden? The state’s meddling in private affairs and family life poisons the social climate and promotes phenomena like spying and denunciation, such as at the beginning of the week in Söderland Bavaria when the police, on a tip, stormed into a little coffee klatsch of pensioners. Quite honestly, our police officers have better things to do.

To no reasonable people can be explained the chaos into which you throw schools and educational institutions, even though the danger of infection emanating from them is only slight. Instead of learning, children must grapple with questionable mask duties and freeze in continually aired-out classrooms. At any time during these unplanned hagglings over the extension of the school holidays have the parents been thought of, who besides often certainly have no additional vacation days so as to care for their children? Who shall understand that it shall be in order to go to work in full buses and subways, yet it shall be an unbearable risk to eat in restaurants with tables far distanced from one another?

What is that for a breach of trust as concerns restaurateurs, retailers, the self-employed, and the small businessmen who for long grind their teeth and endure? Many in good faith have invested not a little so as to implement the hygiene concepts only to again find themselves in a lockdown. This lockdown will finish off many and destroy their livelihoods and leave the retailers in the desolated inner cities to starve in an extended poverty. The government thus punishes precisely those who have done everything correctly. Not once in the numbers given out by the RKI [Robert Koch Institute] is there evidence that the closing of restaurants might have a noteworthy influence on the incidences of infection.

Lockdowns without end strengthen the state sector and in the long-term destroy the Mittelstand and the variety of self-employed businessmen and freelancers on whom is based the strength of our market economy. It therefore directly depends on the citizens’ self-responsibility if we wish to find a way to deal with this situation. Long-term meddling by the state is really no solution. Do not underestimate the citizens, and do not overestimate yourselves.

The state must concentrate itself on its core duties, support and invest in the performance ability of the healthcare system, construct capacities where required, and secure the functionality. Beyond that – as I already in March indicated – it must find preventative measures for the protection of especially endangered groups of the population and medical personnel. Timely prevention would have been the right way.

The overcoming of the crisis requires a calm, believable information policy and must be based on clear, comprehensible criteria. To this day, you do not obtain that. We however before all need an open, honest and unincited dialogue over what is to be done and in fact before, and not after, the decisions are taken, as we are doing here today.

            Ansgar Heveling (CDU/CSU): You yourself must laugh at that!

It is quite clear to me that that hits you.

             Britta Haßelmann (Greens): That does not hit us!

In this debate must be everything essential [sachliche] and

             Anton Hofreiter (Greens): You do not at all know what the word                                            “essential” means!

and not only that which has been acceptable to the Chancellor and some of the Minister-presidents. We may thus turn back to democratic normality.

             Anton Hofreiter (Greens): You also do not know what democratic is!

 Many thanks.

 

 

[trans: tem]