German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 19/209, pp. 26315-26316.
Right honorable Herr President. Frau Chancellor. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.
This undignified spectacle goes to the next round.
Katrin Göring-Eckhardt (Greens): It begins with your speech!
A round of wheeling and dealing in the backrooms, unforeseen by the constitution, decides wide-ranging interventions in the life and freedom of the citizen. The Chancellor lays down beforehand what shall come out of it, the Minister-presidents on the periphery conduct a PR of their own, play at opposition, and nevertheless ultimately acquiesce. The parliament, the voice of the sovereigns, notwithstanding may afterwards debate a little on it, like today, yet is not included in the decision-making. What an embarrassing mise-en-scène, what an impudent display of the arrogance of power, right honorable ladies and gentlemen.
And what open disregard of the citizens who suffer under your unilateral decisions and whom you treat like vassals, whose life, rights and fates you believe to be able to dispose of at whim. What the Federal government pursues here is unconstitutional.
You play with our children’s future. It is not the virus or the pandemic which robs an entire generation of students and children of the opportunity of an education – it is your false policy which appears to know only prohibition and force, which takes valuable lifetime from young and old people, families and professionals, self-employed and businessmen, which drives them to depression, solitude and ruin.
Three months of a wave-breaker lockdown and you still want to hang a month on that. The collateral damages of your blockade and shuttering methods grow immeasurably. The German Heart Institute fears a massive increase in the number of cardiac fatalities because shut-in patients may not go to the doctor. A lack of preventive care examinations will also allow the number of cancer fatalities to increase.
This lockdown policy leaves behind in the labor market its trail of devastation: A half million more unemployed, millions in part-time work, 175,000 businessmen and self-employed who stand before insolvency, restaurateurs and merchants whose life’s work shatters, retail tradesman who have long since consumed their last resources, who sit on a mountain of debt and unsold goods, yet of the grandiosely announced assistance have still seen nothing – this you have, ja, plainly granted.
I ask myself: Do you want to annihilate the Mittelstand, the backbone of our prosperity? Do you want to bring us to the state of a developing country? Then please say it quite openly. The people want to know where you are when they next time go to vote, right honorable ladies and gentlemen.
You cling to the lockdown, hostile to economy and constitution, as if there were no intelligent alternatives. And instead of offering to the citizens a reliable perspective for a return to normality, you continually and arbitrarily change the parameters: Doubling time, R value, seven day incidence. For to simply progress from preventive measures decided at 200 incidence to an incidence value of 35 is a renewed violation of the law. That must be quite clearly said here.
Michael Grosse-Brömer (CDU/CSU): Which you however do not decide!
Your government has grandiosely ruined the rapid vaccination of a major portion of the population, which you likewise had declared to be a target value, because you, in violation of the subsidiarity principle, delegated the competence to Brussels. And now there are newly detected variations of the virus – you say “mutations”, that sounds more threatening – which must stand in as justification for the lockdown. The citizens are full – I must quite clearly say it to you – of this to and fro, of this policy in suspense. They justly feel themselves sold for dumb when they learn that your Interior Minister, already before the first lockdown, had demanded the most dramatic as possible scenarios from compliant scientists so as to be able to claim harsh restrictions, or when it comes out that the Chancellor’s office, with hastily jotted-down, arranged and compliant opinions, has worked toward rapid and long-term school closings.
Where you install your favorites – so as to say it to you quite clearly – there these fail: Herr Altmaier, in regards the compensation of businesses affected by the forced closings; and Frau von der Leyen in regards the organization of the vaccine procurement. It is just breathtaking to set forth and maintain that on the whole nothing has gone awry and that the government is doing its best. I certainly do not want to imagine what all must happen before you have finally for once taken responsibility for failures. Inconceivable!
The Corona policy in our country must be fundamentally straightened out again. We need the speedy and binding withdrawal from the lockdown. The way therein must be openly deliberated, and with the inclusion of the parliament. For that must the entire breadth of professional and scientific expertise, without defamation and exclusion, be heard. The goal must be to especially protect those advanced in years and those with pre-existing conditions in the public establishments,
Michael Grosse-Brömer (CDU/CSU): To lock up, or what?
to make possible a self-responsible self defense for all others endangered, to prepare sufficient vaccine for those willing to be vaccinated, to strengthen the healthcare system so that it is ready for unavoidable illnesses and to make possible for all citizens a normal as possible life. For that they of course pay taxes and for that they also pay into the social insurance system.
The basic rights must again come into force. They are guaranteed by the constitution and are not allotted by the government. A restriction requires substantiation and not your reconstruction, right honorable ladies and gentlemen. That is naturally not as easy as threats, prohibitions, and the distribution of money in long-term exceptional situations, yet for precisely that have you been elected. Thus turn back to a constitutional politics.
Michael Grosse-Brömer (CDU/CSU): Babble!
Many thanks.
Ulli Nissen (SPD): Not a word for the dead! How shabby is that then?
Michael Grosse-Brömer (CDU/CSU): Man, man, man!
What else does not occur to you?
Michael Grosse-Brömer (CDU/CSU): In regards the speech, nothing occurred to you!
Nothing occurs to you in any case.
[trans: tem]
