EU Parliament, Strasbourg, P10 CRE REV(2025)10-08(3-0208-0000).
Herr President, my valued ladies and gentlemen.
In 2019, as the Green Deal stood directly in the starting blocks, and as Greta Thunberg here still strode through the meadow, we already had studies which said that we in the next years alone in Germany would lose 200,000 to 400,000 workplaces in the automobile industry, if it came to the Verbot of the combustion engine. Now we stand here again today, and the question is put: Man, the industry, it goes so badly; we just don’t know why it goes so badly.
Herr colleague Wölken of the SPD: It goes badly for the industry because people like you want to represent an activating industrial policy, and it is called nothing other – the viewers may want to look at the previous video of colleague Wölken – than a planned economy. You want to interfere in the production management of individual firms, and that certainly cannot be. If here is brought in the examples of iphones and the accomplishment in relation to Nokia, of the horse and carriage and the setbacks of the automobile, then to all that can only be said: These projects, these technologies have succeeded – planned by free undertakings, demanded by free citizens.
What we require is freedom, not still more planned economy, not still more Wölkens in this house here. We again need freedom for our businesses and for our citizens. In this sense: Away with this Verbot, yet also away with the fleet penalty payments!
[trans: tem]
