Alice Weidel, April 20, 2020, EU Reconstruction Funds

Alice Weidel

EU Reconstruction Funds

AfD Kompakt, April 20, 2020

[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.]

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the southern EU states are definitely cobbling up the next Trojan horse; they wish thereby to palm off on us the illegal mutualization of state debts by means of common loans. Eurobonds remain eurobonds, and are illegal and lack solidarity, even when the EU Commission itself wishes to sell these debt instruments for which the member states shall be liable in the scope of the EU budget.  

With her fecklessness and lack of direction, Frau von der Leyen is about to blow up the EU. Once the original sin of trillions is committed, the floodgates are opened to further, insatiable demands. Then the formal liability limitation quickly becomes a scrap of paper.

The Corona crisis concerns all European states. That is no excuse for an EU-wide financial power grab by which the EU Commission drives forward the ultimate dis-empowerment of the national states. For its own state budget and its own state finances is each of the member states itself responsible: That is the legal and treaty basis for the EU and for the euro. He who exploits the crisis to further hollow out this principal in the end destroys both.

[Translated by Todd Martin]

Gottfried Curio, April 15, 2020, Border Defense

Gottfried Curio

Border Defense

AfD Kompakt, April 15, 2020

[Gottfried Curio is an Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from Berlin. He is a physicist and musician and is the AfD’s Bundestag spokesman for interior policy.]

What the AfD delegation has predicted and of which it has warned, has now happened: Erdogan has discerned that the EU and Germany are susceptible to extortion and now, with previously acknowledged methods, renews efforts to compel yet more advantage. Instead of acquiescing to Erdogan’s last extortion effort, the money could have been used for a thoroughly effective border defense. This would have a priori taken from Erdogan the leverage which, after all, has made possible the placing of demands upon the EU. The German government, on the other hand, naturally does not wish to displease anyone who reliably sluices additional illegal immigration into the EU and thereby de facto into Germany. Thus, the angst before the voters linked to him in Germany already for long is allowed to determine German policy.  

Obviously, Erdogan regards solely the tactical advantages of his procedures: Either migrants unwanted in Turkey are transported to Europe or concessions, material and immaterial (visa freedom, EU accession negotiations) are compelled. He need not reckon with the negative consequences for the European states which hitherto, without complaint, have allowed themselves to be tyrannized. Properly targeted economic sanctions (i.e., exclusion from payments transfer) which might drive the economic costs to Turkey to a level at which extortion may no longer appear to pay, appear not to frighten him.

Just as properly against the demands in the councils of the southern European EU countries for a debt mutualization (besides Target 2, a bank union, EZB loan purchases and now EU unemployment insurance and the alienation of the purpose of the ESM, the so-called reconstruction aids), so also ought not the Federal government give way against Erdogan; yet instead, it is ever again the settlement of crises by means of the robbing of German taxpayers. This policy of the eternal, fair weather trade is counter to German interests. Germany must not allow itself to be the defenseless milch cow for the Corona costs of other countries, nor allow itself ever again to be lead by the nose around the circus ring by Erdogan.

[Translated by Todd Martin]

Gottfried Curio, April 9, 2020, State of Law: Corona and Migration

Gottfried Curio

State of Law: Corona and Migration

AfD Kompakt, April 9, 2020

[Gottfried Curio is an Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from Berlin. He is a physicist and musician and is the AfD’s Bundestag spokesman for interior policy.]

The state of law ought not to be put into Corona quarantine. That asylum applicants could no longer be allowed legal counsel is a fully unjustified finding. That, based on this, asylum applications will now no longer be rejected is a mockery. Since then there will be a double standard and so shall not citizens who are no longer able to legally appeal, say, fines or GEZ [public broadcasting] contributions just so be exempted from these?

As soon as this new practice of the BAMF [migration office] makes the rounds, together with the news that the German borders are, as before, open to asylum applicants, a new pull factor will originate: It is understood to be contemporaneous with the increased number of migrants – indeed also from neighboring European countries; since Germany with its well developed healthcare system is certainly, in the time of Corona, an especially attractive goal of migration.

The securing of state sovereignty, that is to say, a control over whom may stay in Germany, will apparently, even in the time of Corona, not be classified as system relevant by the Interior Ministry. Ja, false course corrections in the government’s asylum policy will not only be perpetuated during the Corona crisis but foreseeably will be made uncorrectable. To the practices of allowing, without legal basis, entry from secure third states and the chain toleration of rejected asylum applicants is now added that obviously unfounded applications nevertheless will for now be accepted, with the prospect of then simply acquiring legality by prescriptive right.

With the Corona crisis, the securing of the border and a thrifty budgeting of financial and material resources really take on an acute urgency. If Germany is soon to be the last country still open, it will become the last remaining goal of poverty migration. The correct consequences must now be drawn: Closure of foreign borders and the limitation of asylum applications to those persecuted in Germany’s immediate neighbors.

[Translated by Todd Martin]