German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 21/3, p. 132.
Herr President. Ladies and gentlemen.
Besides broken election promises and announcements, nothing is put forward to us from black-red one week after the assumption of government. It may be objected: New governments need time – in that regard, two things: First. Germany does not have this time; every citizen of this country feels that. Second. Half of the Merz government is not at all new. The SPD election losers are stuck – with a small intermission – for 27 years in the Federal government. How long do you still require to show results? 50 years? No, right honorable colleagues, there is no no-hunting season in politics. We’ve heard enough excuses. The AfD grants the new government no training period.
Chancellor Merz was just in Kiev and has made photographs with his new colleagues, promised further weapons deliveries, and demanded an armistice which was just like before rejected. For me, it made the impression as if this rebuff from Moscow had been intended so to continue the old Ampel course. Otherwise, so much foreign policy naïveté cannot be explained. The Kiev trip was thus only a PR ploy, nothing other. There were no new ideas, no acknowledgment of Realpolitik facts, and no readiness to reconsider the broken down wrong way of the previous government. You simulate strength where none is. That will not work. For the German defense policy, the new government’s prognostics are in any case at a standstill. All announcements, your coalition contract and the old Defense Minister’s justifying the acceptance, that will be no rupture. You say that quite openly and call it continuity. Only, this continuity has led the German defense policy, just so as our entire country, into the dead end. Your continuity means not only a standstill, but loss of substance.
What Germany needs is plainly no further so, but a new approach which the Merz government cannot deliver, because it lacks the prerequisite for that, the will, free and sovereign, to take in hand Germany’s future. For that is required the exact opposite of continuity. It requires courage, a smart readiness to take risk, and an affirmation that Germany stands for itself [ein Bekenntnis zu Deutschland, das für sich selbst steht]. My party has entered the 21st Bundestag with exactly this claim. Our next goal is clear: We want and will overtake the government in 2029, and put the German defense policy, without restriction, in the service of our country.
For the AfD, our armed forces, the Bundeswehr is an expression and means of a sovereign national state. Our demand is that the Bundeswehr be in the position to defend Germany on the water, on the ground and in the air. The question is thus: Which prerequisite do we require for that?
Sara Nanni
(Greens): Cyberspace!
The answer of the old Defense Minister, we know – we’ve plainly heard it: More money. The result: An armed forces not capable of national defense. Our answer is a clear acknowledgment of Germany as a nation, a clear acknowledgment of the national state as the highest regulating framework, and a clear acknowledgment of the state as a servant of the nation.
I have in the past eight years many times said: There is not only a materiel and personnel mission readiness, but also one of ideas [ideelle]. Without an ideational mission readiness, even a fully equipped armed forces can never undergo a mission and a fight. Two examples: The Afghan national army was for 20 years armed and trained by NATO, and surrendered to a guerilla force in sandals in a few hours. The Ukrainian army fights for three years an opponent superior in materiel and personnel and holds out. With amazement, the CDU and SPD then stand before the Ukrainians’ will to fight, without asking themselves from where comes this will to fight. It is the soldiers’ undiminished relation [Bezug] with the country and people.
Ladies and gentlemen, such a positive relation to one’s own nation is restrained by the self-named democratic middle, not only for our soldiers but also for our countrymen. You also restrain it for yourselves. At the same time, this positive relation is the clear acknowledgment of our grand country, which is what we require to again set Germany aright in defense policy, but also in all other policy fields. Precisely that, we of the AfD want to achieve and will at the latest by 2029 implement.
Ladies and gentlemen, Boris Pistorius is representative of the new Federal government. He can ever only say what he wants to fight against: Against the Russians, against hate and agitation, against the AfD. Yet the AfD knows what is worth fighting for. Our soldiers know it also, their oath demands to bravely defend the German people. That is what is worth fighting for.
Thanks.
[trans: tem]
