Alexander Gauland, June 28, 2021, Knife Attack in Würzburg

AfD Kompakt, June 28, 2021

Following the horrifying knife attack in Würzburg, which shocks us all, it does not suffice to mourn the victims and then pass on to the daily order. We need to name those politically responsible for this act and finally draw the consequences.

So as to say quite clearly: These three people could still be living without Merkel’s irresponsible policy of open borders. For the perpetrator came from Somalia to Germany in 2015, the year of the opening of the border.

And the policy has subsequently failed: The victims need not be mourned by their families if the man, whose asylum application was rejected, would have been immediately deported. In view of the continually declining number of deportations, this circumstance is especially alarming. How many potential attackers still linger in our country, although they long since ought to have been deported?

After this act of blood, those politically responsible in Bund and States are not allowed to again put off the citizens with platitudes and pacifications. They need to finally take responsibility for their policy of open borders and may not again trivialize the deed in Würzburg as a single instance.

And they must finally do everything so that such as act is not repeated. Since this state is primarily responsible for guaranteeing the security of its citizens, and not for concerning itself with the welfare of people who generally do not belong here.

 

[trans: tem]

 

Sven Werner Tritschler, June 30, 2021, Junge Freiheit

Nordrhein-Westfalen Landtag, Plenarprotokoll 17/134, pp. 53-54.

Herr President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.

            (The speaker holds up a newspaper.)

The Junge Freiheit is a conservative weekly newspaper which just celebrated its 35^th birthday. A special history binds this newspaper with our State, the State of Nordrhein-Westfalen [NRW], its Interior Ministry and its so-called Constitution Defense. The elders will perhaps remember.

For years in the officials’ annual reports, it was written up as extreme right and thereby stigmatized. Under these circumstances, it was naturally difficult for the little publication to find subscribers and advertisers or even just sales venues. For who would want to thus be brought into association?

For many newspapers, this would have been a death sentence, since an economic existence under such circumstances is scarcely possible, then before the time of the internet. Yet the editorship was made up of idealists and resisted. The former attorney general von Stahl of the FDP brought an action before the Federal Constitutional Court, and the Junge Freiheit won the lawsuit.

The so-called “Junge Freiheit decision” was even path-breaking. The Karlsruhe judges decided that the publication in the so-called Constitution Defense report harmed the Junge Freiheit in its basic right to freedom of the press according to Article 5 of the Basic Law. This basic right secures the freedom to produce and distribute printed statements and thereby the communications medium of the press. Thus far the verdict. That is now on 16 years. There is still a Junge Freiheit, and it is one of the few publications in print with a growing circulation.

The NRW Interior Minister is no longer red; he is meantime black and is called Reul. This was evidently not learned in his house. Respect for freedom of the press has also not increased there. Thus the CDU minister openly conducts himself exactly like his SPD predecessor in bestowing advisory performance grades for the press. Ja, worse still, he insinuates a radical right attitude to police officers who read the Junge Freiheit. And he shall receive a bloody nose. Thus the verdict of the Administrative Court in Düsseldorf on May 21:

“The respondent” – that is Herr Reul – “is ordered to cease to assert, to let be asserted, to spread abroad or let be spread abroad, that the reading of the Junge Freiheit can be evaluated as a warning signal for a right-wing extremist attitude.”

It is good that at least our courts for the most part still function, when in the ministries one is after all no longer so exactly taken with the Constitution.

Unfortunately, not every publication can avail itself of expensive attorneys and processes. Otherwise, Herr Reul would probably have a whole series of proceedings by the neck. I want for  once to name two examples. Flinkfeed, a conservative on-line magazine, was scarcely on the market than the president of the so-called Constitution Defense NRW, before the Interior Committee and the gathered, competing press, declared it to be somehow anti-constitutional. “Anti-feminist” texts initially sufficed for proof. Thus is feminism now apparently an integral part of the Constitution. 

Then subsequently also the State institute for media, which you have made into a censorship authority, sent pages-long warnings [Abmahnungen] which somehow landed in the press, and the young media makers needed to give up, since they could not avail themselves of expensive attorneys.

Still, the makers of the right-liberal magazine Krautzone have not given up. Yet they too without a close examination by the Ministry are again placed

            (The speaker hold up an edition of the magazine.)

in the muck corner, naturally the right-wing muck corner. This may be looked up in the diverse publications of the Landtag.

Herr Reul, it is difficult to believe that this is just an accident or an incompetence. It is much more about how you and your friends of the other so-called democratic parties, still as before, suppress critical reporting. It would indeed be most preferred by you if our media landscape would consist of the WDR and the broadcast media group of your party friends Holthoff-Pförtner.

It is then also unbelievable when you and your party friends and the representatives of the other old parties shed crocodile tears over Hungary and Herr Orban. You may be more supple – I grant you that – yet basically what you are doing here with a free press is not one jot better.

            Helmut Seifen (AfD): It is so!

My delegation, the AFD delegation, wants a free and independent press landscape; the more offerings, the better. We hold our citizens to be sufficiently intelligent to make for themselves their own picture, and our police as well so. They should be allowed to read what they want, whether it be the Junge Freiheit, the Rheinsiche Post, vorwärts or the Neue Deutshcland. A minister who calls himself democratic must support this.

Herr Reul, it would be time – you have adequate opportunity – to apologize, not only to the Junge Freiheit but also to its readers and to those readers who are amongst our police officers.

Many thanks.

 

[trans: tem]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sylvia Limmer, June 29, 2021, Price of Electricity

AfD Kompakt, June 29, 2021

In 2004, then Minister for the Environment Jürgen Trittin had affirmed to the Germans that the EEG [Renewable Energy Law] assessment would cost no more than an ice cream cone per month. He must have meant a very large ice cream cone becoming ever larger.

Since the EEG assessment, the price of electricity in Germany has more than doubled and the taxes more than tripled. Over half of the price of electricity today consists of taxes, duties and assessment, so that Germany has the highest electricity price throughout Europe. Were taxes and duties subtracted from the costs of electricity, the kilowatt-hour in Germany would cost 14.51 cents instead of over 30 cents – electricity would then be cheaper than in Belgium, Ireland and Luxembourg, and would be only insignificantly above the EU average.

The actual price of electricity on the other hand increasingly burdens consumers and businesses. The wholesale price of electricity, for example, has more than doubled since March 2020. If a halt to this development is not ordered, business will pass on the higher electricity price to its customers – then not only will the electricity be more expensive, but also the products. Thereby threatens loss of workplaces as a result of the departure of businesses with high energy consumption.

This is the consequence of an ecology-planned economy which breaks with market economy principles, which, by means of state-forced marketing, priority feeding and a twenty-year guaranteed feed tariff, subsidizes forms of energy which are not market viable. Here each year sums in the billions will be re-distributed from consumers and industry to a few, mostly politically- and state-connected recipients of subventions – which is pure climate clientelism.

Such an energy policy endangers that for which it needs to stand: Secure, cheap electricity compatible with the environment, which is not at the cost of economic competitiveness and prosperity. To relieve electricity customers and businesses, we demand without reservation the elimination of the electricity tax, the EEG and the current subvention obligations. The other parties on the contrary are over-taxing exactly these, otherwise the Union, FDP, SPD and Freie Wähler would not just recently have voted for the EU climate law, which as ever for the Greens and Linke does not go far enough. The AfD is the only party opposed to this ecology-planned economic system overthrow, apparently approaching harmlessly with climate rescue rhetoric and a sunflower optic.

 

[trans: tem]