Monday, April 21, 2025

Björn Höcke, March 20, 2025, Financial Coup d’État

Thüringer Landtag, Plenarsitzung 8/12, pp. 2-4. 

Right honorable Herr President. Right honorable colleague members. Right honorable visitors in the gallery. 

I want to beforehand admit that I stand before you today with a feeling that represents a mixture of rage and sorrow: Rage and sorrow over what happened two days ago in the German Bundestag. We need to speak of it, that we have a political special situation in Germany these days. On that account, the summoning of this special plenary session has been enormously important, and was a correct decision which we as the AfD delegation have reached. I very much regret that even in regards this important theme that Minister-president Voigt is not in the house. 

Right honorable colleague members, on February 23rd of this year, the state sovereign of the Federal Republic of Germany with a perfectly clear result voted out of office the Ampel government. The Greens lose massively, the SPD brings in its historically worst result and the FDP left the Bundestag. The message of the voters was clear: We want no further so, we want a fundamentally new direction in the German Politik, we want less multi-culti, we want less climate policy, we want less debt, we want more fiscal solidarity. The was the clear message of the sovereign. 

And what did the CDU do, did Friedrich Merz do, in fellowship with the red-green government? They summoned the old, voted out of office Bundestag, already dissolved by the Federal President, so to go around the new power relation to enforce a debts policy of madness to the harm of the German people. 

            Liebscher (SPD): That is just nonsense, stop spreading lies! So far, the                                    new Bundestag has not yet met…!

What we experience here, right honorable colleague members, what was passed in the Bundestag two days ago and tomorrow in the Bundesrat shall brought to a conclusion, is nothing other than  a financial policy coup d’état. Ice cold, a career-crazed Friedrich Merz slapped the voters in the face. Merz broke a central election promise of the CDU and piled up a debt mountain of a trillion, and that only so as to receive in hand the key to the Chancellor’s office, only so as to make his latest, striven career step. This, right honorable colleague members, this conduct is without character and is one of the low points in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. 

The pre-history of the financial policy coup d’état well needs enrage every democrat. Still in February, Merz vigorously twittered – just a few days before the Bundestag election, he did this – against the Ampel government’s debt orgy, especially that of the SPD, and posed as a defender of the debt brake. 

Yet it was a central election promise of the CDU to maintain this debt brake and let justice be done for coming generations. And now leading CDU representatives and leading Green representatives disclose that the debts coup was already planned in November 2024 in a CDU committee, and this quarreling with the Greens was pure election campaign noise. The Union simply lied impudently in the face of the Germans. 

Do you know, right honorable colleagues of the SPD and right honorable colleagues of the CDU, that this theater which has now been contrived in the German Bundestag – the Greens are, Gott sei Dank, no longer present in the sovereign house in Thüringen – 

            Liebscher (SPD): What you contrive here is theater!

do you actually know what an injury you have caused? Do you actually know which injury you have inflicted on the German democracy? 

I am much underway in Thüringen, I speak with many of Thüringen’s citizens, and ever more say to me: I no longer have the feeling of living in a democracy; I have the feeling of living in a simulation of democracy. And I cannot contradict these people. 

The changes of the Basic Law and the undermining of the debt brake first in the Bund and then in the States have fatal effects for coming generations. Thüringen, right honorable colleague members, right honorable State government, must set itself in the Bundesrat against this financial policy run amok. An abstention does not suffice for this highly important theme. And your conduct and this circumstance which I have just sketched, it is now to be discussed, and I therein rejoice. 

Many thanks.


[trans: tem]