Martin Sichert, April 16, 2021, Corona Crisis Relief

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 19/222, pp. 28173-28174.

Frau President. Ladies and gentlemen.

We here put forward three concrete demands for the relief of the citizens and businesses in this difficult time. We want [Drucksache 19/28450] that part-time work not be subject to the progression reservation so as to avert additional margins for the affected employees and to avoid additional tax declarations. We want [Drucksache 19/28448] that fitness facilities may open, since fitness is an elemental factor for people’s health. And we want [Drucksache 19/27849, 28502] that businesses which, due to the lockdown policy, have been affected by breakdowns in turnover, can more easily delay payment of the social insurance contributions. It is much more injurious when businesses go into bankruptcy, because they can no more pay the contributions, than when these businesses survive and later pay back the social insurance contributions owed. We demand that on any contribution of which, due to the lockdown policy, the payment will be delayed, no sort of interest fall due and therefore no sort of giving of security be necessary.

As we see it, we of the AfD ever again submit concrete proposals which can relieve business and citizens so that as many as possible of these can endure this crisis. It is completely incomprehensible that all other parties in committee reject relief like the delay of payment of social contributions for the domestic economy.

            Markus Kurth (Greens): Imbecility! There is already all of this!

For such a demand is reasonable and it is lasting. It perhaps in the short-term costs the state some money, yet in the long-term produces more economic power and thereby also more tax revenue.The delayed payment of social contributions is an investment in the future of Germany as an economic site. All the other parties here which do not want to invest the couple of millions are, mark well, the same parties which have no problem expending 750 billion euros of German tax money for the EU. You have a fully false set of priorities, ladies and gentlemen.

We now have already for over a year the lockdown crisis and the proceedings of the Federal as well the State governments are ever still absolutely bungled. No one knows how many people are ill with Corona, how many lie in intensive care on account of Corona, or therein die. Massive restrictions of the basic rights are based on some fake numbers like the incidence value.

The current regulations in Germany are absolutely crazy and I am sure: If in a hundred years someone reads of this, he will laugh over how so crazy it could be. If one completely healthy wants to buy his clothing not in a supermarket but in clothing store, then he needs to produce a negative test. Assuming he tests positive, yet despite that wants the clothing store, then he does three further tests at various test stations until he has a negative test. By means of the three positive tests, he increases the incidence value, into which comes three additional cases.

Peter Weiss (CDU/CSU-Emmendingen): Yeah, to be happy about that! Just unbelievable! Such stupidity!

If on the way to the clothing store he now has an accident and on that account must go to intensive care, he is a Corona intensive care patient and if he dies from the accident then he is even a Corona death, and this although Corona has nothing to do with his death or his injury. That, ladies and gentlemen, is absolutely frivolous.

The only serious statistics which we have are those for the mortality and the utilization of intensive care beds. In regards the mortality, in March we were 11 percent under the average mortality of the last five years. The utilization of intensive care beds is since many months constant at about 20,000 occupied beds.

Peter Weiss (CDU/CSU-Emmendingen): Where does he live actually? Does he live on the moon?

The Federal government knows this and it has consequently cancelled orders for 8,500 breathing apparatus.

            Peter Weiss (CDU/CSU-Emmendingen): Does he live on the moon?

Ja, that you do not want to hear; that is quite clear to me.

            Peter Weiss (CDU/CSU-Emmendingen): Because the facts do not agree!

You prefer to make children’s birthdays into illegal mass assemblies and are now concerned that every twelfth girl between 15 and 19 years has massive psychic problems on account of the lockdown.

            Stefan Müller (CDU/CSU): Such rubbish!

Have you at all considered what you are doing to children who will be tested in groups of classes, and who then in so public a mass test is the only one to have a positive test? Who then will treated like a leper in the Middle Ages? What that does to the psyche of a child, that I wish, truly said, for no one.

            Peter Weiss (CDU/CSU-Emmendingen): Yeah, is it preferable that all the                                others shall be infected?

Ja, we know that some members of the governing delegations earn very well in the crisis and that after the next Bundestag elections the Greens want to be at the fleshpots.

            Peter Weiss (CDU/CSU-Emmendingen): That is just shameless, to infect all the                    students! Scandalous!

Yet while you here enrich yourselves, you impose all consequences on the people and you are not ready to care for a little relief.

Show that you are not indifferent to the fate of many long-suffering people and vote for our motions for at least some relief of the people.

            Markus Kurth (Greens): That is repulsive, what you are saying!

Many thanks.

            Peter Weiss (CDU/CSU-Emmendingen): The AfD wants that all children                                be infected in the schools! Fabulous! That needs to be told to the people                                in Germany!

            Markus Kurth (Greens): Ja, such speeches need to be prohibited!

 

 

[trans: tem]

 

 

           

 

 

 

Alice Weidel, April 16, 2021, Population Defense Law

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 19/222, pp. 28103-28105.

Right honorable Herr President. Frau Chancellor. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.

Never has a Federal government dared in so few sentences to provide for so many attacks upon the citizens’ basic rights and freedoms, upon the state of law and democratic principles, as in this draft law.

The proposed supplement to the Infection Defense Law is an alarming document of a command state mentality. This regression into authoritarian anomie [Ungeist] emanates from the Chancellory and from you, Frau Chancellor.

Your distrust of the citizens and the institutions of democracy and the state of law has clearly lead by the hand the intentions of this law. You distrust the citizens; on that account, you dangle them by day and confine them by night. You distrust the States and localities; on that account, you put the axe to the roots of the Federal Republic’s federal architecture and dis-empower minister-presidents, State councils and bürgermeisters by Federal law.

You distrust the courts, the appointed controllers of state affairs; on that account, you remove district and administrative courts by means of centralization – possibly because these lately have even overturned some of your infringements of civil rights.

And now you allow yourself to write into law an empowerment [Ermächtigung] – your choice of word, not mine! – to issue legal decrees with the agreement of the Bundesrat. To this we say: Confinements [Ausgangssperren] are disproportionate and unconstitutional. For millions of people, whose residence is not so privileged as, for example, members of the Federal cabinet, they are hell. In the fight against the virus, confinements are on that account useless, indeed even counter-productive. The danger of infection in the out-of-doors is now almost nil and does not depend on the hour of the day.

Arbitrarily set incidence values as determinative criteria are in any case absurd. They depend on the number of tests performed and are liable to be driven up at discretion. Without feedback to the test size, the portion of those in fact sick, and the elderly cohort of those affected, they also are not evidentiary. Many scientists confirm this, most recently the former chief virologist at Charité, Professor Krüger. “Listen to the science”, so runs your mantra. You however only listen to the voices which you want to hear and which confirm your prejudices. On that account, you put aside contradiction as a conspiracy theory.

On that account would a differentiated and transparent debate be urgently necessary so as to better reach decisions. If it was for you in fact primarily about fighting the pandemic, you would have long since been able to make use of the suitable and targeted preventive measures which we here have ever again demanded.

Covid-19 primarily is dangerous for specific groups at risk. Thus, offers of targeted protection need to be made to these threatened persons, instead of restricting the basic rights of all and driving the entire country to the wall.

The overburdening of the healthcare system is prevented neither with hospital closings nor reduction of intensive care beds, but by targeted investments in personnel and infrastructure. For that, you had sufficient time which was not used.

With this law, you want something other, the endless lockdown, although five months of wave-breaker lockdown has more than enough shown that this primitive prescription does not at all function.

And you make allowance that the Mittelstand is ruined, the labor market is distorted by long-term state intervention, that inner cities crumble, that an entire generation of students is lost and the cultural and associational life dies. You proscribe entire branches with occupational prohibitions. You expropriate merchants and businessmen, restaurant and tourism operations, through months-long, forced closings without regard to an exit. Countless businesses will never re-open. Generations-old family undertakings will vanish forever – the backbone of the business Mittelstand is breaking.

A wave of insolvency of never known dimension approaches Germany, a massive increase in depressions, damaged children's souls, old people languishing in isolation, disturbed youth and ruptured families. These are the collateral damages of your long-term lockdown policy!

The citizens are losing trust in a state which sics the municipal authority and high penalty fines on one of a Westfalen married couple of restaurateurs who, standing before ruin, re-opens his café out of despair. The citizens are losing trust in a state which with police commandos storms a pensioner’s birthday and hunts children from a playing field, yet lets drug dealers in the park have their way.

The citizens are losing trust in a state whose police annoy with custom barriers those seeking recreation in the parks, yet must stand idly by at clan weddings.

For more than a year, you mis-use the Corona crisis so as to enforce impositions with which, under normal conditions, you might never succeed: Travel, contact and assembly prohibitions, the removal of the last stop lines for state indebtedness, an EU debts union which annuls the budget law of this parliament and takes hostage the German taxpayer for spending orgies in Brussels.

And now you attempt, the Basic Law aside, to introduce through the backdoor, under the pretense of the infection protections, an emergency legislation which for good reasons is not to be foreseen from our constitution.

Britta Haßelmann (Greens): Can you for once say what you want? What does the AfD want?

It means nothing other when you place the citizens as a whole under a general suspicion of being a potential danger to health

            Thorsten Frei (CDU/CSU): Such imbecility!

and want to divest and confine their basic rights.

It would be grotesque and false to give additional, wide-ranging competences of this kind to a government which so often and so notoriously fails and which has broken the law. The AfD delegation, deeply convinced of freedom and democracy, therefore rejects this draft law.

I am grateful.

            Britta Haßelmann (Greens): Not one sentence from the AfD of what they want!

            Tino Chrupalla (AfD): Listen for once!

            Britta Haßelmann (Greens): Yes clearly, in regards the theme, they are bare.

 

 

[trans: tem]

 

 

 

           

 

 

 

Götz Frömming, April 14, 2021, Fourth Generation Nuclear Reactor

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 19/220, pp. 27857-27858.

Right honorable Frau President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.

Dear colleague Müller, you have just designated yourself as friend of a technologically open approach. So, if what you have put forward here shall be a technologically open approach and the CDU is for this, then it really becomes time for this party to be dissolved at once and for the government to be assumed by another party which really is technologically open.

Ladies and gentlemen, consider for once that there may be a technological procedure to deal with the legacy of the usual nuclear energy facilities, or even of disarmed nuclear weapons, so that it radiates less and for less time and thereby the problem of final storage would be largely solved. Let us further consider that the required facility would be so built that the risk of a nuclear meltdown would be technologically excluded. Let us further consider that, with this facility, economic electrical power could be produced. We in Germany in the interim still have the highest prices for electricity worldwide. Consider finally, in case the contribution of people to climate change presents a problem to you, that this technology might have a positive CO₂ balance similar to that of wind energy. – Ladies and gentlemen, when all of this appears possible, at a minimum, research into a technology should be promoted.

Numerous highly developed industrial countries are doing this. It is plainly not so, Herr colleague Müller, as you have presented it, that only the – in quotation marks – “Spinners from the AfD” might be for something like it. I name for you the countries which are researching this technology: Among which is the U.S.A., China is, Japan and South Korea are – all of our friends, all AfD countries apparently – Great Britain and France are at it in Europe, naturally in addition to Euratom. What you here are doing of course does not suffice by far. They all support research and development of fourth generation nuclear reactors and have gathered themselves together into an international research union, the GIF.

Only Germany, ladies and gentlemen, is not at it. Why? Because this Bundestag, following the Fukushima earthquake catastrophe in the year 2011, which resulted in a nuclear catastrophe, reached a decision driven by angst, panic and populism and indeed for the complete withdrawal from nuclear energy and research. The former Hamburg environment senator Fritz Vahrenholt, SPD, has lately written very perceptively in the newspaper “Cicero” – just you laugh! – that at that time, ladies and gentlemen, you had thrown out the baby with the bath water; since this decision was directed and is directed not only against all reactors, but also against further research in this area.

In 2019, we had directed a minor inquiry to the Federal government. They answered us – I cite with your permission, Frau President –  :

            Research for development of new reactor concepts will not be                                                 supported on the part of the Federal government.

Thereby, ladies and gentlemen, threatens the complete loss of Germany’s inclusion in an important future technology. At the same time to have withdrawn from all conventional processes of energy generation, that, ladies and gentlemen, is in fact a political and economic harakiri, as correctly formulated by Fritz Vahrenholt.

Too often, ladies and gentlemen, have we Germans held ourselves to be smarter than all others and set about on a special way [Sonderweg]. It was certainly not rational decisions – I said it already – which, besides in 2015 with the opening of the borders

            Timon Gremmels (SPD): Bingo!

            Marianne Schieder (SPD): that needs to come earlier, Herr colleague!

and in 2011, following the catastrophe in Fukushima, had been reached. Today, ladies and gentlemen, to acknowledge these decisions as historically wrong decisions requires an informed intelligence – to admit the mistakes, a greatness and a boldness of character. You can demonstrate both today.

It is just not so, ladies and gentlemen, that we fail to recognize the risks in the usage of nuclear energy.

Franciska Brantner (Greens): A daring greatness is to be sure not to be found                           with you!

I myself many years ago as a young man had demonstrated against dying forests and nuclear death. Some mature, to perhaps become more reasonable in the course of life, others remain standing still.

There are also risks with reactors of the new type. They are however calculable and capable of being mastered. All other technologies of energy generation also have risks. When we think of what you are doing to our landscape with the gigantic wind industry arrays which you want to build

            Sylvia Kotting-Uhl (Greens): Much worse than an atomic super center?

on the peaks of the Taunus, now in the Black Forest, in the North Sea, in the Baltic, when we see how you haul gigantic electrical lines through our country for your mad ideas, when we see Alpine valleys put under water, when we see how you destroy nature and Heimat, then we say as a party of nature and Heimat defenders: We would prefer to have modern gas and coal power plants, combined with safe, modern nuclear energy facilities of the fourth generation, ladies and gentlemen.

            Carsten Müller (CDU/CSU-Braunschweig): Of which there are simply none!

Our motto as the AfD delegation is: Research instead of retreat. You are in retreat; you retreat from the future. Other countries are going the right way. We should close ranks with them. Turn back from this German Sonderweg; it leads astray.

I thank you.

            Marianne Schieder (SPD): “Here hops and malt are lost”, as is said in                                    der Heimat.

 

[trans: tem]