German
Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 19/222, pp. 28103-28105.
Right honorable
Herr President. Frau Chancellor. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.
Never has a Federal
government dared in so few sentences to provide for so many attacks upon the
citizens’ basic rights and freedoms, upon the state of law and democratic
principles, as in this draft law.
The proposed
supplement to the Infection Defense Law is an alarming document of a command
state mentality. This regression into authoritarian anomie [Ungeist] emanates from the Chancellory
and from you, Frau Chancellor.
Your distrust
of the citizens and the institutions of democracy and the state of law has clearly
lead by the hand the intentions of this law. You distrust the citizens; on that
account, you dangle them by day and confine them by night. You distrust the
States and localities; on that account, you put the axe to the roots of the Federal
Republic’s federal architecture and dis-empower minister-presidents, State
councils and bürgermeisters by Federal law.
You distrust
the courts, the appointed controllers of state affairs; on that account, you
remove district and administrative courts by means of centralization – possibly
because these lately have even overturned some of your infringements of civil
rights.
And now you
allow yourself to write into law an empowerment [Ermächtigung] – your choice of word, not mine! – to issue legal
decrees with the agreement of the Bundesrat. To this we say: Confinements [Ausgangssperren] are disproportionate
and unconstitutional. For millions of people, whose residence is not so
privileged as, for example, members of the Federal cabinet, they are hell. In
the fight against the virus, confinements are on that account useless, indeed
even counter-productive. The danger of infection in the out-of-doors is now
almost nil and does not depend on the hour of the day.
Arbitrarily
set incidence values as determinative criteria are in any case absurd. They
depend on the number of tests performed and are liable to be driven up at
discretion. Without feedback to the test size, the portion of those in fact
sick, and the elderly cohort of those affected, they also are not evidentiary. Many
scientists confirm this, most recently the former chief virologist at Charité,
Professor Krüger. “Listen to the science”, so runs your mantra. You however
only listen to the voices which you want to hear and which confirm your prejudices.
On that account, you put aside contradiction as a conspiracy theory.
On that
account would a differentiated and transparent debate be urgently necessary so
as to better reach decisions. If it was for you in fact primarily about fighting
the pandemic, you would have long since been able to make use of the suitable
and targeted preventive measures which we here have ever again demanded.
Covid-19
primarily is dangerous for specific groups at risk. Thus, offers of targeted
protection need to be made to these threatened persons, instead of restricting
the basic rights of all and driving the entire country to the wall.
The
overburdening of the healthcare system is prevented neither with hospital
closings nor reduction of intensive care beds, but by targeted investments in
personnel and infrastructure. For that, you had sufficient time which was not
used.
With this law,
you want something other, the endless lockdown, although five months of
wave-breaker lockdown has more than enough shown that this primitive prescription
does not at all function.
And you make
allowance that the Mittelstand is
ruined, the labor market is distorted by long-term state intervention, that
inner cities crumble, that an entire generation of students is lost and the
cultural and associational life dies. You proscribe entire branches with
occupational prohibitions. You expropriate merchants and businessmen,
restaurant and tourism operations, through months-long, forced closings without
regard to an exit. Countless businesses will never re-open. Generations-old
family undertakings will vanish forever – the backbone of the business Mittelstand is breaking.
A wave of
insolvency of never known dimension approaches Germany, a massive increase in
depressions, damaged children's souls, old people languishing in isolation,
disturbed youth and ruptured families. These are the collateral damages of your
long-term lockdown policy!
The citizens
are losing trust in a state which sics the municipal authority and high penalty
fines on one of a Westfalen married couple of restaurateurs who, standing
before ruin, re-opens his café out of despair. The citizens are losing trust in
a state which with police commandos storms a pensioner’s birthday and hunts
children from a playing field, yet lets drug dealers in the park have their way.
The citizens
are losing trust in a state whose police annoy with custom barriers those
seeking recreation in the parks, yet must stand idly by at clan weddings.
For more than
a year, you mis-use the Corona crisis so as to enforce impositions with which,
under normal conditions, you might never succeed: Travel, contact and assembly
prohibitions, the removal of the last stop lines for state indebtedness, an EU
debts union which annuls the budget law of this parliament and takes hostage the
German taxpayer for spending orgies in Brussels.
And now you
attempt, the Basic Law aside, to introduce through the backdoor, under the
pretense of the infection protections, an emergency legislation which for good
reasons is not to be foreseen from our constitution.
Britta Haßelmann (Greens): Can you for once say what you want? What does the AfD want?
It means nothing other when you place the citizens as a whole under a general suspicion of being a potential danger to health
Thorsten Frei (CDU/CSU): Such imbecility!
and want to
divest and confine their basic rights.
It would be
grotesque and false to give additional, wide-ranging competences of this kind
to a government which so often and so notoriously fails and which has broken
the law. The AfD delegation, deeply convinced of freedom and democracy,
therefore rejects this draft law.
I am grateful.
Britta Haßelmann (Greens): Not one sentence from the AfD of what they want!
Tino Chrupalla (AfD): Listen for once!
Britta Haßelmann (Greens): Yes clearly, in regards the theme, they are bare.
[trans: tem]
