German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 21/56, pp. 6651-6653.
Right honorable Frau President. Right honorable Herr Chancellor. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.
You assert in your speech you would strengthen our ability to compete. Yet of that, our economy still has noted nothing. The bankruptcy tsunami sweeps unbraked over our country, and will in this year, on the basis of chain insolvencies, exceed a record mark of 30,000. The Mittelstand suffers the worst. The backbone of our prosperity is breaking. Our economy is threatened with collapse.
Your self-praise in matters of tax reduction sounds like bare-faced scorn for citizens and businesses. In fact, your coalition, driven by the SPD hostile to performance, discusses a confiscatory and anti-Mittelstand intensification of the inheritance tax. You thereby want to conclusively cash-out the Mittelstand.
And you have just hiked yet again the taxes for all by means of the rise of the CO2 duty by a full 20 percent. You have thus already in past years with this special cost fleeced citizens and businesses of 22 billion euros. That is a pillaging of our economy.
You spoke at Davos. You boast of the modernization of the decaying infrastructure. Of that is true only that you have agreed to a gigantic mountain of special debts which you here disguise as special funds. Half of these infrastructure special debts flow illegally into consumption spending. Your transportation minister on the other hand now again lacks the money for the construction start of urgent railway projects.
A similar load of hot air is your bureaucracy deconstruction. So far, you’ve only built up new bureaucracy
Alexander
Hoffmann (CSU/CSU): You actually always make the same speech. Can that be?
as through the supply chain law and a massive growth of positions in the public sector.
And as to the reform of the social system which you ever again have promised and announced to the citizens, you have there so far in any case only further raised the costs, and shamefully caved in to the demands of your 14 percent coalition partner, enacting still more tax- and debt-financed redistribution. That which you needed to do – namely, to lower the expenditures and put a stop to the abuse – you will never manage with the SPD.
The labor minister’s Sozialstaat concept even wants to simplify the access to social benefits; savings in regards the benefits are expressly excluded. All of this will cost the taxpayer still more.
Sepp Müller (SPD): Rubbish!
It shall thus simply so continue with the exploding rise of the Kindergeld transfer payments to foreign countries. Over 5 billion euros since 2010, a half billion euros in last year alone. The social duties reach a record value.
You plunder the working people, rob their willingness to work, the future, and the trust in the Sozialstaat, and still say to them they should work longer. That is an infamy.
Yet that unfortunately also shows that you have certainly not understood the actual problems in this country. It lies not in the working time, but in the politically fashioned, much too high costs due to the green energy transition which you continue to manage, in the much too high taxes and duties for business, and in the excessive bureaucracy.
Götz Frömming
(AfD): Exactly!
You yourself designate the nuclear power withdrawal as a mistake, yet all the same blow up nuclear power plants, as in CSU-governed Bavaria last October. Thus appears double morality. You lie to your voters. That shows that you bend before the Diktat of the SPD and Greens. There is a majority for the re-entry into the nuclear power – in the society and, if you want it, also in this house, in this parliament. Yet you do not want it.
You explain windpower as a transition technology; yet at the same time, you want to complete Habeck’s green madness plan, to continue to sink billions in subventions for wind parks in the North Sea without a return, and, after the home forests, to seriously damage this susceptible eco-system.
Götz
Frömming (AfD): Schweinerei!
As a last rescue anchor, you cling to new gas power plants. With what do you want to operate them? And how do you explain to the people that at the same time the German gas network should be destroyed and they should tear out their gas heating? You want to wreck and destroy an infrastructure which was erected by an immense expenditure of earlier generations. That can be explained by no one with a healthy, human understanding.
Your government supports the fateful EU decision to forbid imports of advantageous natural gas from Russia and for the future. The new, one-sided dependency on expensive American liquified gas proves to be extremely inefficient and dangerous.
Frauke
Heiligenstadt (SPD): Here is what is quite differently dangerous!
And without additional gas power, the storage certainly runs empty.
Ralf
Stegner (SPD): Your intellectual storage runs quite empty!
A gas shortage with grave, compulsory shut-offs threatens.
All of these grotesque contradictions, false assertions and fantasies are responsible for that Germany and this Federal government are no longer taken seriously in the world. And that is fatal, certainly in this geo-political situation.
The U.S.A. is an important ally; yet they represent their own interests. And we need to finally define and self-consciously represent our own national, German interests, certainly when they diverge from those of our allies and partners. To send a dozen soldiers to Greenland, and next day order them back is – with permission – a hullabaloo, and no serious, solution-oriented foreign policy guided by interests.
Franziska
Kersten (SPD): What?
It is a mistake that you reject the peace council initiated by Donald Trump.
Britta Haßelmann
(Greens): Rip off a couple of billion dollars, ne?
Katrin
Göring-Eckardt (Greens): You yourself need laugh!
The board is an opportunity to unravel the multiple blockades of an ineffective UN.
Katharina
Dröge (Greens): That is ridiculous!
It lies on the other hand in the German interest to quickly end the Ukraine war. Germany needs to cooperate in the peace process and realize its own interests. To that belongs averting an EU and NATO membership of the Ukraine, and further transfer payments from Germany. Much more, we require compensation for the state terrorist attacks on the Nord Stream gas pipeline infrastructure, vital for Germany, for which Kiev is obviously co-responsible.
Britta
Haßelmann (Greens): Do so further peacefully!
The EU, the cohesion of which you stereotypically swear by, also here is part of the problem, and not of the solution.
For Germany to win back its economic strength and its political weight, we need to set aside the mistaken developments which weaken us.
Irene Mihalic (Greens): Kremlin or MAGA?
Britta
Haßelmann (Greens): It’s difficult to have to decide between Kremlin or MAGA!
We need to end the mass migration and, as far as it goes, reverse it. This way requires a restrictive immigration policy, with invariable border controls, rejections, and rigorous deportations,
Ralf
Stegner (SPD): Perhaps you should remain in Switzerland.
as well as a shut-off of the social and financial migration magnets, and we in addition require an immigration and naturalization moratorium.
Frauke Heiligenstadt
(SPD): And you also want to have ICE, ne?
We need to rescind the ruinous energy transition and climb up out of the climate protection policy.
Katrin Fey
(Linke): My goodness!
It is a German and EU solo approach [Alleingang] which destroys our economy.
Only when we depart from this wrong way can we deconstruct the financial excess cost, and overcome the paralyzing bureaucratic manipulation and over-regulation.
Ralf
Stegner (SPD): That is the result of your irradiation [Verstrahlung]!
The way to the resurgence leads through the re-entry into the nuclear power, the abolition of the CO2 duties, and the immediate elimination of the combustion engine ban and heating law. An AfD government will get these reforms underway, for which this government is not ready and in position.
I am grateful.
Jens Spahn
(CSU/CSU): That was all? That was just nothing!
[trans: tem]
