German
Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 19/239. pp. 31109-31111.
Right
honorable Herr President. Right honorable Frau Chancellor. Right honorable
ladies and gentlemen.
That certainly
was a phenomenal show!
Michael Grosse-Brömer (CDU/CSU): A phenomenal appearance, that was!
I do not
know. Does Angela Merkel still belong to the CDU/CSU? I anyhow have not heard
it. And I may therein remind you that it has been the CDU, Angela Merkel, who
has permitted a Linke Minister-president in Thüringen. That is your dessert, and
on precisely that account you thus stand in the polls as you presently do.
Your last
term in office, Frau Merkel, was for Germany a period of accelerated decline.
To your successor is left a reconstruction job, an insecure and divided country
the representatives of which are pleased with the role of moral headmasters,
yet in a serious case with concrete challenges founder and fail like dilettantes,
a country the wealth of which erodes and which in unexampled ways squanders and
gives away its resources.
With the
Corona reconstruction funds, you have conclusively delivered the German taxpayers
into a debt and transfer union. The ECB’s money glut has arrived at the
climbing inflation of consumer prices. Together with the manipulated zero and
negative interest rates, that means the organized mass expropriation of the
citizens with a yearly loss of wealth in the hundreds of billions. The individual
feels that in his account which no longer yields interest and in his loss of
purchasing power. In regards private assets, even so as with the pension level,
Germany takes a loser’s place in the EU.
Instead of
reforming the pension system, fortified for the demography, you make uncovered
promises of payments. How it shall continue after 2030 when the cohort of the
high birthrate years goes into retirement, for that you have no plan. For that,
we have the highest mountain of debt in our postwar history. After a year and a
half of a Corona debts policy, the public state debt has increased a full 10
percentage points from 60 to 70 percent of the GDP. Together with the implicit
state debt, the sustainability gap is 440 percent of the gross domestic product
or 14.7 trillion euros. Olaf Scholz, your Vice-Chancellor and coalition
partner, as Finance Minister has to definitively answer for this debt mountain.
Herr Scholz speaks much of respect, yet has little respect for the
hard-working, normal people who get up each day, drive to work, raise their
children and for that are continually penalized. Your government has no respect
for the people and none for the Mittelstand
businesses and family operations which employ millions of people and which, if
it subsequently goes red-green-left, shall be expropriated by an asozial wealth and inheritance tax.
On the other
hand is the regression into the sub-standard in almost all areas. So as to name
just two examples: The education system and digitalization. In mathematics and
natural sciences, the performances of German students have fallen below the EU
average. In an international comparative test, Germany since 2007 has fallen
from 12th to 25th place. In a digitalization ranking,
Germany meanwhile stands in third to last place among the G-20 states, left
behind even by France and Italy, to which we provide dozens of billions in
so-called Corona reconstruction assistance.
An additional
unresolved problem of this government is the migration crisis.
Ulli Nissen (SPD): That had to come!
As before,
each year a major city immigrates into our country and directly into the social
system. That you find that to be super, we know. It obviously is not enough,
what you have brought upon this country and its people with your intentional
violation of the law in 2015. Now this government mis-uses the Ortskräfte who have served the
Bundeswehr in Afghanistan so as to unleash the next wave of immigration to
Germany.
Of the around
4,000 evacuated Afghans so far in our country, all of 168 were Ortskräfte, yet more than 250 persons
quite without papers among whom are previously deported offenders, criminals
known to the police, rapists, child molesters, Islamists, who were brought in at
state cost and, as a consequence of the recent halt to deportation, will remain
for an unforeseeable time. While other states focus on the security and the raw
materials in the region, the German policy interests itself primarily in the
evacuation of Afghans willing to exit.
This
breakdown in the asylum and migration policy will enter into the history books
as the greatest failure of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s time in office.
The future
financial burden for our country totals over one trillion euros. Still worse
weigh the damages which the loss of control means for the domestic peace, the
citizens’ security, the trust in institutions
and the inner cohesion of our country.
And your
misguided climate protection and energy transition policy will come to be expensive
for us. Billions upon billions burnt year after year to fill the pockets of the
windpower and eco-electricity lobby, while Germany muddles through a planned
economy thicket of E-auto subvention and CO2 taxation.
The irrational
idea of simultaneously shutting down coal and nuclear power plants robs an
industrial country like Germany of its mainspring, a secure and affordable
energy supply. With the same furor, you want to subsidize electro-mobility
without troubling yourself over the questionable environmental balance and the
limited availability of the raw materials for the requisite battery production.
From where besides shall come the additional electricity for all the electro-autos
which you want to bring into the streets? On that, you have obviously done no
thinking. Or do you seriously believe you could convert German industry to wind
and solar electricity and green hydrogen? Do you know what is needed for that?
For that, you need multiply tenfold the number of windmills to 330,000 and
cement a quarter of the surface area with rotor towers. And if then the wind
does not blow, then these nevertheless do not turn. Does a sustainable policy
appear thus? We quite clearly say, Nein.
With such half-baked ideas you make our country the laughing-stock of the world
and the Germans the losers in global competition.
No one in
Europe or elsewhere in the world seriously thinks of copying the German energy
transition. We are the only hippie state – this needs to be quite clearly said
here – which seriously wants to implement these crackpot ideas, cost what it
will, “Whatever it takes”, as Draghi cares to say.
In the last
two decades the price of electricity in Germany has doubled and the EEG [Renewable Energy Law] assessment
increased tenfold. As a consequence of this coalition’s unreal [weltfremden] climate goals, in the next
year by means of the increase in the so-called CO2 pricing, the rise
in fuel costs threatens to be up to 70 cents per litre. That means prices far
beyond the 2 euro mark, even if the Transportation Minister promises otherwise.
That neither protects the climate nor saves the planet, but it does impoverish
commuters and families dependent on the automobile. It ruins those in the Mittelstand and drives from this country
productive industries and hundreds of thousands of workplaces.
Beside all
these financial burdens, one number in the government’s balance is especially
disturbing: Of all EU citizens, the Germans feel themselves to be the least
free. Only 11 percent still see themselves free in their everyday life. This
Federal government’s Corona policy, without orientation and measure, therein
has a considerable part. By turns, ever more of our European neighbors seek the
way back to normality. You however enclose this country together with its
people in a permanent state of exception, and instead of with reason and a good
eye rebounding from preventive measures becoming obsolete, you trick school
children and youths, even in the new school year, with masks and testing
regimens, the utility of which has not been proved.
And you yet
again break the promises you have given to the citizens, namely: If an offer of
vaccination was made to everyone who is ready for it, the preventive measures
need end. – It now lies in the responsibility of each individual and his personal
risk assessment whether he himself decides for a vaccination or other precautions
for his own protection or not. It is an individual decision. And you divide the
country and the society when, based on this personal decision, you play off people
one against the other and exclude from social life the non-vaccinated as
second-class citizens. Every alarm bell must shrill when out of the mouths of
politicians the non-vaccinated are defamed as “social disgraces” and a
Vice-Chancellor even designates the vaccinated as “test rabbits”.
And you
practice a de facto forced vaccination – without thus naming it – so as to
steal away from your responsibility for the consequences of your wrong
decisions. For a year and a half you conduct, under the name of the fight
against the pandemic, a policy of broken promises and excessive restrictions of
basic rights: From travel restrictions, lockdown and occupation bans, through
confinements and emergency preventive measures, defamation and demonstration
bans against critics, to forced vaccination and drastic interventions in the
rights of parents and children.
You say you
listen to the science when you now once again speculate as to which new
withdrawal of the basic rights you could again implement following the
election, and thereby always mean those scientists who flatter you. Thus
finally take notice of other points of view; for example, the opinion of 100
doctors, jurists and businessmen who in an open letter demand clear and binding
statements for the end of the pandemic policy. Stop diverting the citizens with
angst talk and panic-making from the many urgent themes. Finally reinstate the
basic rights comprehensively and for all so that this country can return to
normality and devote itself to an unsparing and honest inventory of the entirety
of its problems and challenges.
I am
grateful.
[trans: tem]
