Alice Weidel, March 4, 2020, Coronavirus

Alice Weidel

Coronavirus

German Bundestag, March 4, 2020, Plenarprotokoll 19/148, pp. 18440-18441

[Alice Weidel is a chairman of the Alternative für Deutschland delegation in the German Bundestag as well as AfD chairman in the western German state of Baden-Württemberg. Charité is a large hospital in Berlin. Jens Spahn is German Minister for Health.]

Right honorable Herr President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.

The situation is serious. Worldwide, the Coronavirus has seized 76 countries and produced over 3,200 deaths. 93,000 are presently registered as infected. Meanwhile, in Germany the number of confirmed infections has risen to 258.

No one knows exactly how many people actually carry the virus and spread it further. The leader of virology at Charité warns: Up to 70 percent of the German population could be infected. Nevertheless, there is as of today no well-designed Corona testing organization with clear lines of responsibility. He who arrives from an at-risk area, and will allow himself to be tested, is often sent from Pontius to Pilate – no one feels himself to be competent. This chaos and this competence confusion are not a doom from out of the blue; it is the consequence of a substantial political failure and amounts to a negligent gamble with the lives and health of our citizens.

From what we generally know, there is with this virus a higher danger of infection and greater risk of fatality than with the common flu. A recognition which you, Herr Spahn, were still disavowing on January 24. You said that the Corona infection develops more mildly. That was not your only false statement. On January 27, you asserted that we are well prepared. You are still doing it.

            Britta Haßelmann (Greens): For you, it has to be bad!

Four weeks later, on February 26, you admitted: We find ourselves at the beginning of a Corona epidemic. Nothing happened is these decisive weeks.

            Andrew Ullmann (SPD): That is not correct.

Christian Aschenberg-Dugnus (FDP): You certainly know nothing about it!

You are of the opinion that time must be gained for the necessary preventative measures. In the past weeks, you should have long since accomplished that. Instead of employing your own competence, you hide behind cost-benefit analyses which are like water in a sieve for overcoming the crisis.

            Claudia Roth (Greens – Augsburg): Mein Gott!

Even now, there is presently no crisis center to plan for the securing of care by preparing preventative supplies. This ought to have been done weeks ago.

            Britta Haßelmann (Greens): Must you make political capital out of everything?

Now it comes home to the fact that, during your time in office, the last antibiotic production facility in Germany had to be closed. The supply situation of the corresponding medicines visibly worsens.

The people’s unrest would doubtless be much less if this government could have made a more competent and serious impression and if the citizens could have had confidence that their government concerned itself with its core duties; in fact, the defense of the citizen and crisis prevention, which you for weeks have culpably neglected.

            Britta Haßelmann (Greens): You have today once again disqualified yourself!

Time is short. Therefore the consequences of the changes and communications failures are not to be retrieved. Instead of rhetorical pablum, substantial, immediate measures are now required. We must comprehensively employ and ceaselessly expand the available treatment capacities so as to arm them against a sudden increase in the cases of illness. How many intensive care beds can be made ready in the short term, how many isolation stations are available?

            Karin Maag (CDU/CSU): We know that, Frau Weidel. Only you don’t.

How many will be required? That must be coordinated. We need comprehensive and obligatory tests for persons at risk as well as for the people suffering from the flu or a bad cold.

            Andrew Ullmann (FDP): There are no screening tests.

A separate testing infrastructure is required, instead of leaving it to the practicing doctors and the hospitals with their research and care-giving. To expect that house doctors and primary care practitioners can render aid without the necessary support borders on a negligent act of bodily harm.

The urgently lacking preventative supplies for doctors and medical personnel should be made ready. Otherwise, the failure last Sunday at Charité will be repeated, in which an entire emergency room shift had to be put in quarantine after a suspected case had tested strongly positive, and that after the patient had been sent home. Also needed are temperature controls in the airports, as is being done in China.

            Sabine Dittmar (SPD): What a waste!

The voluntarily completed questionnaires which the Federal government composes are, unfortunately, ineffective. We require a systematic entry control at the border which the Federal government unfortunately rejects. Austria can stop trains, the Italians can put migrant ships in quarantine, but Germany leaves the borders uncontrolled.

            (Noise from the Greens: Ah!)

We know you find that funny.

The unresolved migration crisis is now dramatically intensifying. With particular intensity, the virus rages in the Near and Middle East. And now Turkey puts an estimated tens of thousands of migrants on the way to Europe.

            Florian Post (SPD): Should we close the borders?

Nevertheless, the Federal government proclaims the dogma of open borders. This obstinacy aggravates the danger of infection and can cost lives.

Anton Hofreiter (Greens): You must be happy that you are allowed over the Swiss border!

The usual lobbyists – Herr Hofreiter, you are screeching again – accordingly cry for the controlled incorporation of all [alle kontrolliert aufzunehmen]. That is not only naïve, that is hair-raisingly irresponsible.

            Kersten Steinke (Linke): That is humane!

For the especially endangered parts of the population, old people, people with multiple illnesses, substantive protective measures must be taken. Also, they must feel that they can and must contribute. Due to the striking neglect of the timely identification of those persons unfortunately already infected, there can now occur a sudden increase in the number of cases of illness.

Right honorable ladies and gentlemen, this theme is very personal for me.

            Britta Haßelmann (Greens): Obviously.

We are dealing with an authentic crisis. Naïve podcasts by the Chancellor, soothing sermons, measured and moderate, or “We are well prepared” cannot talk that away. Where is the strategy? I see none at all! Wake up! Please be professional. Apply yourselves to the real problems, and conduct yourselves as befits the interest of this country and its citizens! That is what you were elected for and we stand ready to support you.

Many thanks.

[Translated by Todd Martin]

           

           

Lothar Maier, March 5, 2020, Raw Materials Supply

Lothar Maier

Raw Materials Supply

German Bundestag, March 5, 2020, Plenarprotokoll 19/149, pp. 18643-18644

[Lothar Maier is an Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from the western German state of Baden-Württemberg. He is a retired economics professor. He here presents an AfD motion (Drucksache 19/17525) concerning German raw materials supply.]

Right honorable Herr President. Ladies and gentlemen.

In this debate, we are speaking of German industry’s mid and long term supply of raw materials, and specifically of those which we must import from non-European countries. Raw materials supply generally becoming a greater problem was not foreseen ten years ago. The economy was accustomed to be able to purchase any necessary material in sufficient quantity on the world market. Not even one raw material was actually scarce.

Today we must acknowledge that ever more important raw materials are ever more difficult to procure. Rare earths, diverse metals, minerals, sources of energy and even certain agricultural raw materials. The reason is not the exhaustion of raw material reserves but the centralization of the market. Large consumers, primarily China, but also the USA, France and Great Britain, have secured monopolistic hold on important sources of minerals and determine the price. Worthy colleagues, ja, with raw materials, power politics is being pursued. Who would have thought it?

Late, but not too late, the Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie has pointed to the threatening dangers in its Berlin raw materials declaration and admonished the Federal government to take resolute action. Sadly, this alarm was unable to waken the Federal government from its deep slumber. There, one appears to continue to believe that the market will regulate all. It does that, but with consequences other than those dreamt of by this government.

There is no coherent German raw materials policy to speak of. China has secured for itself not only raw material reserves in Africa, South America and Asia, in which not only the deposits are brought under control but to which is also delivered the necessary infrastructure like streets, railroads, harbors and airports for complete transportation and processing. German investments in this sector remain at best selective and uncoordinated. They will not be supported diplomatically by the Federal government and adjusted to a development concept for the target country, nor will the possibilities of technical cooperation be employed for supportive measures, primarily in the area of infrastructure but also for the training requirements for qualified skilled labor. TZ [Technical Cooperation] and private investments run along unrelated to one another and often the TZ pursues goals which seem to originate from another world.   

The Development Ministry’s budget of 10 billion euros allows it to finance the infrastructure and training projects of many significant private investments in the target countries which could economically advance those countries. Instead, a large portion of the TZ budget for small and micro projects is squandered by a highly dubious setting of goals, meaningless for development policy. As an example, I name here 170,000 euros for gender-sensitive, male employment in Nicaragua, 67,000 euros for the improvement of the sexual and reproductive health of youth in Bolivia’s District 8 –

            Uwe Kekeritz (Greens): Describe the case for once! What is the background?

– 234,000 euros for the integral and gender-based promotion of organized, small farm families in Uganda, etc., etc. If such projects help anyone at all, it is the employees of these German NGOs who implement them.       

What needs doing in foreign economic and development policy are the three measures we are presenting which correspond equally to German interests as well as to those of the target countries.

First: The coordination of German raw materials and development policy by the creation of an office of Federal commissioner for raw materials policy, its duties consisting of the bundling and linking of national initiatives for the securing of raw materials supply.

Second: The founding of a German raw materials company from an association of private firms which organizes the production and stock-piling of strategically important raw materials and which guides its work. There must be no, or only a very limited, public financial participation.

And third: A new orientation of the Technical Cooperation to the writing not of donated investments which fail as soon as the foreign sponsor has stopped financing the goal, but investments in mutual interests with a long term perspective. The goal of such a cooperation cannot alone consist only of the production and export of simple raw materials, but should also include the organized guidance of the initial processing stages in the target land and supportive measures for the German economy’s substantial investment in the partner countries.

Let’s do something unusual! Let’s do something useful for all!

Thank you.

[Translated by Todd Martin]

Beatrix von Storch, March 5, 2020, Escalation in Idlib

Beatrix von Storch

Escalation in Idlib

German Bundestag, March 5, 2020, Plenarprotokoll 19/149, pp. 18628-18629

[Beatrix von Storch is an Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from Berlin. She is a lawyer. Peter Altmaier is German Minister for Economic Affairs.]

The Greeks today on the Turkish border defend law against violence, freedom against tyranny, and Europe against Erdogan. The little, Christian country on the edge of the EU is being attacked by unscrupulous Islamists. Our solidarity is with the Greek nation.

Erdogan quite openly guides the migrant stream to the Greek border so that its mostly young men – who are not, contrary to what we have heard, from Syria – may storm that border. He wants to throw us into chaos. That is an act of aggression which requires a clear response.

We have the means at hand: Suspension of the customs agreements, penalty tariffs, a stop to armaments deliveries and a stop to the issuance of visas for travel from Turkey to the EU. In contrast, the Federal government’s attitude of submission [Unterwerfungshaltung] is pitiful. The only language this dictator understands is the politics of the strong, and that says sanction and not subvention, as was determined yesterday yet again in the budget committee.

Only a blind man could not see what is coming. Already during the 2016 negotiations on the deal with Turkey, Erdogan had said – or threatened: We can at any time open the doors to Greece and put the refugees on the buses. What he is now doing, he already at that time had announced. The political responsibility for this devastating situation is borne by none other than Frau Dr. Angela Merkel. Merkel has sacrificed the defense of the German border so that she could be celebrated in the press as Mother Teresa. She has thereby given over the border defense into the dirty hands of the Bosporus despot, as well as the leverage to extort Europe.  

            Johann David Wadephul (CDU/CSU): Come to the point, Frau colleague. We are

speaking of Idlib.  

The EU-Turkey deal is Merkel’s deal and its failure is Merkel’s failure.

With that agreement, the Chancellor for better or for worse has tied the fate of Europe and Germany to the whim of an Islamist. Erdogan has incarcerated tens of thousands of opponents. In Syria, he is cooperating with jihadists. In Germany, he blithely presents himself with the greeting of the Moslem Brotherhood. That is the partner of whom Altmaier has said, He may be more European than many Europeans.

How can a government so readily degrade its own country?

Alexander Lambsdorff (FDP): I think we may put Norway on the Bosporus. That’ll work!

The origin of the disaster is that the Chancellor has abrogated the third state regulation [Drittstaatenregulung]. That states that he who enters on foot from Austria has no right to asylum here. Thus, he has not right to an asylum procedure and indeed none to enter. Helmut Kohl wrote in his memoirs of the 1993 basic law amendment which introduced the third state regulation. Only it made the European regulations possible. Only it made possible the full participation in Schengen and Dublin. Only the third state regulation can pull the plug on the smuggling gangs and other criminals.

What the unity Chancellor said then is valid today. The rejection of asylum applications which come from secure third states is the key to solving the crisis. You of the Union, SPD and FDP with a constitutional amendment formed a majority, and that was right; since otherwise the German social state draws in migrant streams from all the world through all the countries of Europe.

            Ottmar von Holz (Greens): Speak for once about Idlib!

That we cannot do. And that we certainly do not want to do.

He who proclaims the ultimate welcome culture for the largest economy with the largest social state in Europe and declares “No man is illegal” bears the guilt that millions of men are on the way, risking their lives and sinking Europe into chaos.

            Christoph Matshie (SPD): What stuff and nonsense!

He who does that is not a friend of mankind but a dangerous wrong way driver [Geisterfahrer].

The Chancellor is now finally at the end of her term as Chancellor. This is the last opportunity to make some restitution for all that she has dished out to Europe.

Steffi Lemke (SPD): At least you are still free to make such statements in plenary session!

            Johann David Wadephul (CDU/CSU): Not a word on Idlib!

Frau Chancellor, address yourself to the migrants in Turkey, tell them that they are not welcome in Germany! Declare your solidarity with Greece! And finally show firmness with Erdogan. Frau Merkel, while in office you have for long shown little dignity in facing the Turkish dictator; but you could at least with dignity go.

Many thanks.

            Martin Schulz (SPD): So long, Frau Goebbels! Fascists!

[Translated by Todd Martin]