German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/12,
pp. 522-523.
Frau President. Ladies and gentlemen.
The Herr Justice Minister just three days ago wrote the
sentence:
Who lacks respect for the parliament, he also obviously lacks respect for the people.
I today have the dubious pleasure for the first and
foreseeably not for the last time as a member of giving a speech to the
parliament yet not in the parliament.
Florian Toncar (FDP): Yet you are in the parliament!
That earlier I sat up here was my free decision, a sign of
solidarity with the people whom you ostracize, disenfranchise and degrade with
your preventive measures.
Marianne Schieder (SPD): Oh my! Oh my!
Now the decision is taken from me. I am no longer allowed to
set foot in parliament.
Britta Haßelmann (Greens): Yet here you are!
The Bundestag members represent all the people, in any case
according to the claim of the constitution. By dividing the parliament, your
separation into clean and unclean made demonstratively visible, you negate the
claim of the constitution in the parliament. Here, the Bundestag itself is lacking
– in any case, its acting majority – in respect for the people. An evil omen
for the new time which this new government, ja,
has thought to introduce.
What now is to be expected of the coming new time from the
Herr Minister’s department? The glance at the contract which you have concluded
amply shows that we as the opposition will be very critically accompanied in
the few things which could still be spoken of, and then there are the things in
which no case will reality be allowed.
Majorities come and go and laws which you conclude can
later, when we stand before the ruins which this government will leave behind,
also again be changed. It will really be dangerous when you begin to alter the
constitution in the sense of your ideology. There were two plans for altering
the Basic Law which already in the past legislative period were dealt with in
the legal affairs committee, happily did not come to conclusion, yet will now
again be pursued.
For one is the writing into the Basic Law of so-called
children’s rights. It is now to be reckoned that it can be confidently excluded,
after the author of the threatening dictum of the state command of the air
above the children’s beds [staatlichen
Lufthoheit über Kinderbetten] has become Chancellor, that something could
thereby result other than an entry way for state encroachment upon the families.
The second is the plan to eliminate from the Basic Law the
ban on racial discrimination. It shall, as you know, be replaced by a provision
over discrimination on racist grounds. If it is now known that, according to
the ideology of the presently ruling parties, racism is something which can be
aimed exclusively against people of certain skin colors, yet never against
people with other skin colors, then it is thereby clear to where this comes to:
Human rights according to skin color. And with us, that is nothing doing.
This will besides be the point with which the CDU, which
according to the statements of many is on the path of rehabilitation and wants
to again become a bürgerliche party, will
find its touchstone. Against AfD and CDU/CSU, a change of the Basic Law is in
any case not possible. We will see how the other opposition delegation aligns
itself.
Many thanks.
[trans: tem]
