German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 21/4, pp. 216-217.
Herr President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen. Dear guests.
Frau Minister, for a beginning: We wish you all the best and much luck. You will need the luck; since you overtake not only an important ministry, but also a social policy field of rubble.
Eight million pensioners in Germany are under the level of the basic security. A hairdresser who worked 40 years gets a pension of 700 euros, while a Syrian with two wives and four children receives 5,000 euros for doing nothing. That is absurd, that is wrong. Those who criticize this are not right-wing extremists, they are simply extremely right.
High energy prices, expensive groceries, and the tax burden drive broad swathes of the population into poverty. The Tafeln report record crowds, the unemployment increases. A country in which a fresh apple and a warm dwelling become luxuries has a failed social policy. He who works in this country will be systematically taken advantage of. The Bürgergeld rises while the real wages sink. The social state becomes an apparatus for punishing the diligent. And then comes Herr Merz tottering around the corner and says to the Germans they need to work more so as to secure the prosperity in this country.
What is sold to us as skilled labor immigration is much too often an immigration into our social system, into a maintained dependency.
Rasha Nasr
(SPD): That is a lie!
More than half of the young foreigners in Germany have no occupational certification, and the number of foreign Bürgergeld recipients is exploding.
Clara Bünger
(Linke): That is mendacious.
Ladies and gentlemen, that is no modern Sozialpolitik. That is a failure of the state.
Tanja
Machalet (SPD): That is a falsehood, what you are telling!
That, what you of the so-called progressive coalition have left behind, is not progress. That is decay! That is the bitter consequence when leftist-green ideologues are allowed to govern, who think there is a basic right to migration, not depending on training level, not depending on the qualification, and without use for our country.
Those who are convinced that a well built social state can combine with unlimited immigration, those are beyond help, and they are not to lead this country [denen ist nicht zu helfen, und die haben nicht dieses land zu führen].
And then we still have the ideologues to whom equality is more important than justice, and redistribution more important than relief. He who produces in Germany will be punished; who does not produce will be paid. The Bürgergeld stands emblematically for your madness. Those same ideologues dream of saving the world climate and of intentionally expensive energy, heating, dwellings and driving. For many, that means freezing in winter, daily renunciations, rising unemployment, and poverty as a new normality. That is no environmental protection. That is a social-political powder keg!
151 AfD members have been elected to stop this ideological blind flight of the cartel parties. We now need a clear change of course – away from ideology, into reason; away from global redistribution, into responsibility for one’s own people. It is time for a Sozialpolitk for Germans.
Precisely for this reason we demand the following measures:
First. Stop the immigration into the social system. Germany may no longer be a magnet for poverty migration. Foreigners maintained long-term have nothing to lose in the Bürgergeld. The social state must be there for our citizens and not for social tourists.
Second. Lower taxes for small and middle incomes! Abolition without replacement of the CO2 duty. An end to green inflation! He who carries the country needs to be relieved – immediately and long-term. More net from gross is no act of grace. It is what the people have earned, those who keep this country running.
Third. An end to social transfers without conditions into Bürgergeld. We need an activating basic security with clear rules and considerations. We need tough sanctions for those who are exploiting us.
Fourth. A life’s work deserves respect – you mentioned it – and not alms. Who has worked for decades can in old age plainly not become a social case. And who has worked must in old age always have more than anyone who has plainly not done that. The whole would be able to be financed if the plundering of the pension accounts by non-insurance benefits was stopped.
Fifth. Let us use the potential we have in our own country. 1.6 million young people have no occupational qualification. We need to give them a perspective with a real occupational training, a targeted qualification. The skilled labor shortage will plainly not be solved by mass immigration, but through training and innovation.
Frau Minister, if you really want social justice, then end this ideologically driven self-destruction of our social state. Finally protect what millions of Germans and well integrated foreigners have built. If you are not in the position for that, then vacate the field, and leave to us this responsibility.
Rasha Nasr (SPD): Certainly not!
Tanja Machalet
(SPD): Never!
I thank you for the attention.
[trans: tem]
