Saturday, June 4, 2022

Alice Weidel, June 1, 2022, Budget

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/40, pp. 3916-3918.

Right honorable Frau President. Right honorable Herr Chancellor. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.

It is really nice that you of the opposition and of the government so well understand one another that you have found a compromise. Yet all of these motions are simply not before us. Have we been sleeping or have you slept? What is it here actually? Put forward the motions so we here can reasonably vote thereon!

But back to the budget – yes, it is a budget debate. Herr Merz has spoken little of the budget. Yet this budget is a document of aloofness, of denial of reality, and of ignorance in the face of the state of the country and its people.

The government coalition presumes to save the world, to unilaterally newly regulate the energy supply for an industrial country and to regulate the climate in 50 or 100 years; yet one’s own country and its people are ruined. 

You speak of “change of times” [Zeitenwende], yet you do nothing about it. You encapsulate yourselves in your ideological fantasies of climate protection, energy transition, multiculturalism, diversity, and refuse to look at reality.

            Saskia Esken (SPD): You love time!

Germany is stuck in a fundamental economic, financial and state crisis which exceeds all those previously known.

And you nevertheless expend the money with open hands. You distribute it to all the world: Climate billions for India here, weapons billions for the Ukraine there. You inflate the state apparatus still further; you create new government posts and grandiosely approve still more positions in the ministries and administrations. On that account, only consolation and alibi politics remain for one’s own citizens and taxpayers.

The Germans pay the highest taxes and duties in the Western world. For that, they receive miserable pensions and an increasingly disfunctional state, a state which is ever less in the position to look after its core duties – the preservation of the state of law and public order, the guaranteeing of domestic and external security – yet which ever more audaciously and overbearingly meddles in the private lives of the citizens, browbeats them, and for that grasps ever deeper into the pocket.

The crisis in which our country is stuck has not fallen from heaven; it has been politically made. Inflation, energy scarcity, exploding energy prices, distorted supply chains, lack of skilled labor and overburdened social security accounts are the consequence of politically false decisions. And, no, you cannot shove off the responsibility for that onto Putins’ aggressive war.

The origins lie deeper. The fatally flawed decisions were arrived at earlier and they primarily have been cast [gefallen] in Berlin and Brussels. The galloping inflation is the receipt for excessive indebtedness and the money trough and zero interest rate policy of the European Central Bank for the subvention of the highly indebted states of Europe. Eight percent inflation means: Savings balances, reserves and pension claims after six years are worth only half. Real wages decline as a consequence of inflation. Almost 40 percent of Germans simply no longer know how they shall pay for their subsistence. What have you actually said to that? What have you offered in the way of solutions? Nothing! Yet more bureaucratic redistribution is all that the Ampel has to offer. Gas rebates, nine euro tickets, one time extra allowances or climate money are an expensive, bureaucratic brief heat which brings nothing and – I need so simply say it – which are only to conceal your own incompetence.

Rising energy prices further heat up the inflation and drive the Mittelstand and middle class into poverty. The German energy crisis has a name: The energy transition [Energiewende]. Simultaneous withdrawal from coal and atomic, fickle electricity from wind and sun as a replacement for a baseload-capable, advantageous energy supply as we once had in this country; and in that regard, the newest idea from the House of Habeck is the removal of natural gas infrastructure for the heating of dwellings. That could and can not go well.

Yet you mis-use the war in the Ukraine so as to accelerate this wrong way, to burn still more money for that, and to drive forward still more destruction of nature by means of monstrous windmills. The German energy costs are now already the highest of all industrial countries, whether with or without the Ukraine war. The energy transition has failed and needs to be most promptly corrected.

And for that you must come to the acknowledgment that the energy sanctions against Russia are counter-productive and inflict more damage on our own country than on Russia, right honorable ladies and gentlemen. As a result of the voluntary renunciation of overland petroleum deliveries – this for once needs to be presented – you endanger the fuel supply in eastern Germany and load still higher energy prices onto the citizens.

To the threatening collapse of the social security system, of which the Federal Audit Authority has warned in an alarm report, you have in any case no answer. Uncontrolled migration solves neither the skilled labor shortage nor the demography problem, and certainly not when the indiscriminate migration from foreign cultural circles of the uneducated and those not able to integrate is permitted

            Amira Mohamed Ali (Linke): Shamelessness! Shame on you, Frau Weidel!

and is even promoted.

On the other hand, one million people in the past year have emigrated from Germany. Not a few are highly qualified who have been lost forever. This brain drain you accept with a shrug

            Jan Korte (Linke): You yourself know about that!

and continue setting up negative incentives for qualified employees.

            Saskia Esken (SPD): Where do you actually live, Frau Weidel?

Thus appears the policy. Of the asylum immigrants since 2016 – keyword, “We can do it” [Wir schaffen das”] – around one million – one million! – are still additional boarders in the our social system. What are you doing? By removal of the sanctions possibilities, you are re-working the Hartz-IV benefits into a de facto basic income.

            Matthias W. Birkwald (Linke): You have not the least idea of a basic income!

And you want to open the access to these benefits in the next step not only for Ukrainian war refugees but also for all asylum immigrants. That means you are even accelerating this trend of unqualified immigration. On the other hand, who has worked 45 years at an average gross wage of 24,000 euros per year lands straight on the level of Hartz-IV, and you do nothing to alleviate this obvious imbalance and place the pension system on a durable basis. And that is the pauper’s oath for this social democratic Ampel government.

We actually need an authentic change of the times in German politics, and that means a departure from ideological illusions and a concentration of state duties and outlays on the essentials. It is right and overdue to approach the Bundeswehr’s armaments and investments obstruction with additional outlays. For decades, the army was neglected and underfunded. For that, all of you, primarily however your party, Herr Merz, bear the responsibility. For 16 long years, the Union appointed the Chancellor and the Defense Minister. It is thus really more than hypocritical to here cast yourselves as rescuers and guardians of the Bundeswehr. And to re-work the Soli, as Herr Merz has plainly set forth here, as a special tax for the repair of your own underfunded Bundeswehr, that is a slap in the face of every taxpayer.

The designation “special assets” [Sondervermögen”] for additional debts is in any case misleading. Why do you name this "special assets”? They are special debts. That would be more honest. That this expenditure is to be anchored in the Basic Law so as to subtract it from the general state indebtedness is an unnecessary and crooked balance trick, and that you quite precisely know.

It would be better – the AfD stands for this – to eliminate superfluous posts from the budget. We are speaking here of a record volume for the budget. Eliminate superfluous posts and concentrate the state expenditures on the essentials! No one can assert that no latitude for that was at hand.  The state in Germany has not too little money but too much – perhaps you understand this concept – and it sets false priorities for these expenditures. That is what it is about.

The bloated estimate of the Health Ministry, quadruple the pre-Corona budget, is by no means to be justified. The overcharged Health Minister is thus allowed to order additional billions of unnecessary vaccine doses and to instigate irrelevant mass testing. Our country surely has other concerns than the new edition of fact-free restrictions of the basic rights and unlawful vaccination campaigns.

Much money will be expended for censorship measures, control of opinion – there, you are the frontrunner – and the so-called fight against the rightists. Pressing, authentic security problems will on that account be downplayed, primarily when it is a question of imported criminality.

Germany needs neither new taxes nor new debts so as to return to good health. We need the return to solid state finances, and that requires more than the inconsequential tweets of this Federal Finance Minister.

If we rather pulp some of the pet projects of green and leftist ideology and clientele politics, then we also have money for relief of the people. Let us leave to the citizens their hard earned money in their own wallets. It is best stored up there.

If we again give precedence to the civil and the business freedom, instead of patronization and control mania, dear Ampel coalition, we may turn back to Realpolitik and place the interests of our own country exactly there where they belong, and indeed in the first place.

I am grateful.

 

[trans: tem]