Peter Boehringer, December 16, 2021, Supplementary Budget

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/9, pp. 388-390.

Frau President. Honored colleagues.

We were, ja, already accustomed under the Groko to some imputations. Yet it is certainly a noteworthy achievement of the FDP Finance Minister in his first of all weeks in office to break alike two central FDP election campaign promises: First of all, with the compulsory vaccination for care-givers, the maintenance of one of the people’s elementary basic rights and freedoms; and today, the promise of a serious fiscal policy. This sell-out of the liberal silverware you should urgently explain to your deceived voters, Herr Lindner.

The 2021 supplementary budget of over 60 billion euros shall be retroactively concluded in January of next year, which is manifestly absurd. No money is to be borrowed for a year in which the Bund has moreover already made 180 billion euros in debts just because the old Groko allows itself to approve an additional 60 billion euros and simply could no longer expend it in 2021; such like the Ampel also now can plainly no more do.

            Otto Fricke (FDP): No money will be borrowed!

These are nevertheless irresponsible tricks unworthy of a Federal government.

If I hear you clearly, Herr Fricke, that the money will not even be expended, then it is all the more an argument not to borrow it today. If you are no longer able to expend it in 2021 in a public budget, then you are not allowed to borrow it. These are bookkeeping tricks; I am coming to that.

It is, ja, already obviously known how much money in these four years will be required at the pump, and it then preferably begins even in the first days to be correctly debited. To this are posed complex legal questions which are apparently too complex for the Union and even the FDP. This is indicated by the erratic behavior of these delegations since 2020; we have certainly and correctly heard it. The FDP in opposition had designated its present procedure in the government as unconstitutional, namely the formation of reserves financed by excess new indebtedness

            Christian Dürr (FDP): That is false!

– that is not false; those were your words – as well as the alienation of Corona means for other purposes.

            Christian Dürr (FDP): Nein!

I am still coming to you, Herr Dürr. You also will be cited; everything is well.

The Union also is today convinced that its own, fully analogous procedure as a governing party in 2020/2021 was now suddenly illegal “financial acrobatics” – a citation of a CSU colleague. You now want – apparently in a state of memory loss – your own conduct of that time, which today is that of the Ampel, to be subsequently tested by a complaint in Karlsruhe. This could not be invented.

The AfD naturally regards these procedures in any case and as always as illegal – as always therefore because we and only we already in 2020 here in the house had brought in corresponding motions of complaint for control of standards [Normencontrollklageanträge]. You may re-read it for yourself, Herr Brinkhaus, Herr Dobrindt, Herr Haase, and gladly also the media: Drucksachen 19/22926 of September 2020, and 19/26549 of February 2021.

Not a single member of the Union then wanted to support these constitutional complaints. And now you explain, Herr Haase, in the FAZ: “The term ‘breach of the constitution’ is in the air”, or here you plainly call the procedure “unconstitutional”. You have, ja, just said so. Or what you have said: Now "Corona credits” become “climate credits”. Ja, that was the same to you. You have done exactly the same, only with somewhat smaller sums; this here nevertheless is pure real satire.

The formation of debt-financed reserves is naturally in general illegal. Not only sound economic understanding

            Otto Fricke (FDP): Oh!

and fiscal understanding and the AfD say this, but also Kirchhof, the former Vice-president of the Federal Constitutional Court, and the Federal Audit Authority which sees as violated the fiscal constitutional principles of per annum and clarity – precisely those which earlier the FDP somehow also saw thusly.  

Professor Schwarz of the Würzburg Uni in any case explains this blatancy – cite – it may be “unconstitutional” and an “impermissible evasion of the debts brake”. And even the very liberal constitutional lawyer Gröpl wrote in the Handelsblatt: “A breach of the constitution par excellence”. Look it up!

Then we do not want in point of fact to entirely forget the just so very active FDP colleague Dürr. You, Herr Dürr, said here in this place on July 2, 2020, as Finance Minister Scholz wanted to employ exactly this same reserves trick

            Christian Dürr (FDP): Nein!

– cite; the protocol is unequivocal:

It – that budget – violates the Basic Law…I do not understand why careers can only be made in the SPD – and the SPD case of Walter-Borjans was comparable –  when unconstitutional budgets are put forward…

– And you further inquired –

… why the CDU/CSU Bundestag delegation here becomes the assistant’s assistant of a possible breach of the constitution.

Today the FDP Minister Lindner wants to hear nothing more of this. What a difference just eight days in power can make; that is really astonishing. Once more for the Union: Until the autumn of 2021, the Union shared in these unconstitutional procedures of the governing parties, and now you speak demonstratively of a policy of stability, of a breach of the constitution. What a difference just eight days in the opposition comes to; this also is astonishing.

Who, like Herr Dobrindt, seriously on the previous Tuesday states to the press: “Who replaces financial policy with financial acrobatics, he quickly removes himself beyond the pale of the law”,

            Alexander Dobrindt (CSU/CDU): So is it!

should quite urgently look in the rear view mirror at his own two past fiscal years and in shame keep quiet. This practiced double morality is really still scarcely to be endured.

Nein, dear colleagues of the Union, you do not get away so easily from the constitution-breaking inheritance of the Merkel era.

            Alexander Dobrindt (CSU/CDU): You have not understood it!

You here criticize something which you yourselves since 2020 have done in many budgets. Yet the good news is: We are gladly prepared to place at your disposal our motions of complaint for control of standards.

The 240 billion euros of new indebtedness for 2021 are allowed to be taken up only on account of the ostensible pandemic state of emergency, and self-evidently will also be used for this state of emergency; this is the legally established connectivity [Konnexität] principle. The Groko already disregarded it. Yet the Ampel no longer makes a secret of it. Ostensible Corona emergency credits will as reserves be quite openly stuck in the new climate and transformation funds. A connection with a cause [Verlassungszusammenhang] will no longer even be dissimulated.  

            Christian Dürr (FDP): That also is false!

And the Hessen State Court – already just cited – has just declared as illegal a very similar procedure of the Hessen State government. Herr Rohde, you have cited very selectively.

            Dennis Rohde (SPD): Read it for once! Read not only the heading! That helps!

The verdict of the Hessen State Court is much more comprehensive than what you have just cited.

The Finance Minister today seriously sees his duty as an – cite – “enabler minister”. Herr Lindner, it would be your duty to do all that is able to be done so as to defend the taxpayer against further super expensive encroachments of the red-green planned economy and ideology politics, not to somehow “enable” these.

My last sentence. The FDP, in regards compulsory vaccination and financial probity in the central points prior to the election, has lied. The new motto of the FDP appears to be: Better to govern unconstitutionally and perjured than not to govern.

Many thanks.

 

[trans: tem]

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steffen Kotré, December 16, 2021, Nuclear Power Plants

 German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/9, pp. 423-424.

Right honorable Frau President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.

Due to the world’s dumbest energy policy, we are meanwhile at five to twelve. The energy suppliers sound the alarm. EON chief Birnbaum prognosticates that an electricity shortfall can lead to shutting down entire cities and that, with the high energy prices, industry will be hunted out of our country. And Amprion, the transmission network operator, to name only one, expresses itself similarly. They all speak of considerable danger for our electricity supply due to the present situation. The electricity grid has now already reached its limit of performance, there are no more reserves.

Timon Gremmels (SPD): It is rather the AfD which has reached its limit                                   of performance!

Please now put an end, ladies and gentlemen, to the lie of a lifetime, that we would in the mid-term get along without coal and nuclear power. Since your answer to the electricity gap – gas power plants and electricity imports – is a fata morgana. Additional gas power plants are not in sight; no one will build them. Where then shall the gas actually come from if the Federal government wants to prevent Nord Stream 2, if our naïve Foreign Minister, with her clumsiness and with her childish megalomania

Timon Gremmels (SPD): For God’s sake!

shoots and acts against Russia and our gas supply?

Timon Gremmels (SPD): Have you something of substance to offer or                                   only insults?

She thereby calls to mind the greats, like perhaps Kaiser Wilhelm II, rather than a modern diplomat, ladies and gentlemen.

Germany needs an energy foreign policy and not an energy prevention policy.

            Marianne Schieder (SPD): And reasonable parliamentarians!

On another point: There will plainly not be able to be electricity imports in times of peak load because precisely then foreign countries themselves also need the electricity. The answer is therefore at hand: Further operation of remunerative nuclear power plants.

Ever more voices express themselves for this; for example, the chief of Volkswagen or the ex-chief of BASF, to name here only a few. The entire world is setting up nearly CO2-free nuclear energy. The Netherlands have certainly perceived their failures and again take up nuclear energy. A great number of nuclear power plants are in planning and in construction worldwide. Even the so-called World Climate Council proceeds thereon that climate goals without nuclear energy are just not to be attained.

Yes, many people have reservations in regards nuclear energy, fear of a total meltdown; yet this fear is unfounded. Modern reactor concepts exclude such catastrophes, ladies and gentlemen.

            Harald Ebner (Greens): Reality is just not your strong point!

In part, a self-sustained chain reaction is generally no longer necessary. Research reactors of this kind are long since under construction, yet unfortunately not in allegedly technology-oriented Germany.

The waste storage problem will be solved with transmutation, remaining material will be re-utilized. Present day radioactive times of 100,000 years diminish: Tomorrow 300 years, the day after perhaps indeed no longer. That is scientific, technological progress, ladies and gentlemen, which you want to prevent.

The left-greens want to diminish the CO2 emission. We want a good value, secure supply of electricity. Na, dann, let us nevertheless come together.

            Julia Verlinden (Greens): Nö, we do not want to work together with you!

With modern, nearly CO2-free nuclear energy both are plainly possible. That would be an intelligent, a reconciling and a fully responsible policy, ladies and gentlemen.

Yet you, those of you who want to prevent nuclear energy – so to say, as an eternal strife – will not be able to prevent the renaissance of safe nuclear energy. What you clearly hinder is our prosperity. You are the world champions in destroying it. We will thus need to subsequently purchase technology in the area of nuclear energy later and again more expensively.

Yet let it be clear to you: We will not be able to do without nuclear energy. You can turn upside down. It is no longer to be stopped.

            Harald Ebner (Greens): You have nothing to do with reality!

 

[trans: tem]

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

Kay-Uwe Ziegler, December 16, 2021, Retail Trade and Vaccination

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/9, pp. 456-457.

Right honorable Frau President. Dear colleagues.

I find it to be crazily characteristic that you have full ranks for the kindergarten theater of your sitting places, yet the business friendly FDP and CDU/CSU parties, when this point in the daily order is past, leave the hall in a flood.  I would really wish that your voters may see this: How important to you is your sitting place and unimportant to you are the interests of business out there in our country.

Dear colleagues, I myself am for 30 years in the retail textile business. I know what is happening out there. I know how it feels. I was twice sent into the lockdown with two days notice. Thus suddenly everything which has been planned up to then is gone. You are no longer able to work with your co-workers; they need be put on part-time with 60 percent net pay; and that is in the area in which the minimum wage is paid. How that feels for anyone who wants to properly pay his people, I cannot at all describe to you. When, without any fault of your own, you need to close your business, then you feel extremely helpless.

We are presently in December and this actually is the most important month for us in this branch. And no, it is not about making big profits but about being able to compensate for this year’s losses, storing up reserves and the next year, and to be armed for what perhaps is yet to come. All of that we can just forget.

Our co-workers shall be controlled by credentials and vaccination certificates. We do not know whether they are thus authorized, whether they are thus allowed, and what happens if they thereby make mistakes. Who pays the penalties? Our co-workers need customers, those who they know for decades and greet at the door and, if they do not fulfill the third “G” for healthy [gesund], again send out. Our customers are the basis, the foundation of the business and we need show the door to these people. This is unbearable and has nothing to do with what business must do out there.

            Johannes Fechner (SPD): It functions very well!

The press headlines: Apocalyptic Situation for the Merchants, Revenue Losses up to 80 Percent. – But the money is not gone; its just that others have it. The great on-line providers are celebrating their second strongest Christmas sales, the large supermarkets have just rearranged their assortment, and all that the small retail merchant can no longer sell is suddenly there for purchase. And it is no problem at all when 100 people stand there according to the rules for the special offers. Yet the one who does not fulfill the last G cannot stop at the small merchant of 100 square meters. They can go to a tobacco store without fulfilling the 3G rule. They however cannot buy a toy for their neighbor’s daughter; that is not possible. That is awfully sad, that however is reality in our country.

When I let all of this pass in review, this pressure which is certainly exerted upon the non-vaccinated, then I have the impression: It is not really about health. It is about requiring the syringe for the non-vaccinated,

            Julia Klöckner (CDU/CSU): It becomes ever more obscure.

and that on the backs of the retail merchants, the restaurateurs and the other service operations. That is the reality which is found out there and which we cannot accept.

Right honorable Herr Chancellor, a few days ago I could still read that you are the Chancellor of the non-vaccinated. I would gladly take you at your word: Stop the discrimination against the non-vaccinated. Stop it so as to remove these people from the backs of the retail and restaurant trades; since these areas for a year and a half have conducted themselves reasonably, in exemplary fashion and with solidarity. Please comprehensively give back to my colleagues their business freedoms and thereby put an end to the irreparable destruction of a pillar of the German economy.

If this should not suffice for you, then please do it for the millions of competent co-workers who fear for their jobs and their livelihood.

Many thanks.

 

[trans: tem]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alice Weidel, December 15, 2021, Scholz Government

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/8, pp. 357-359.

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

The noisy false start, into which your government cobbled together out of left-green blockheads and capitulated liberals has fallen flat, seeks its own kind.

            Jan Korte (Linke): Totally left, ja!

From the first minute, you and your ministers go on a confrontation course with the reality, with the freedom, with the civil rights, with the citizens and with the European neighbors and partners.

Herr Habeck and his State Secretary have undertaken as a first project the annulment of the defense of species so as to be able to clutter the country even more densely with windmills. The defense of nature and species as a sign of sympathy has obviously lost meaning in regards the Greens.

The unspeakable censorship law, the NetzDG, the FDP still wanted to abolish during the election campaign. Now they present the Justice Minister who even wants to intensify the application of the NetzDG.

Interior Minister Fraeser, scarcely in office, declares rightist extremism to be the greatest danger. – I knew that you would applaud that. – The omnipresent leftist and Islamic extremism occurs to you exactly as little as in the entire red-green-yellow coalition contract, with not one word. Of the recent, with difficulty prevented Islamist terror attack in Hamburg, we still have heard to this day no word from the Interior Minister. 

This same Interior Minister came back from Brussels with the pledge that of 40,000 Afghans who for undiscoverable reasons shall be resettled in the EU, to haul 25,000 of the same to Germany alone – Spain and France undertake just one tenth of this number – and that, even though the number of asylum applications moreover again strongly increases, and Germany by far throughout Europe accepts the most asylum applications. It is thus clear. Germany continues not only along the previous government’s Sonderweg as a migration magnet – in this dead end, your government gives it full gas.

The same moral presumption is stuck behind the instructions which Frau Baerbock believes it necessary to impart to the Poles because the country of Poland takes seriously its European responsibility and effectively defends the EU external border against illegal migration.

Herr Lindner of the FDP capitulation party, who in the distant past spoke gladly and much of solid state finances and promised them, puts forward as a first a supplementary budget of 60 billion euros.

            Stefan Keuter (AfD): 60 billion! Hear! Hear!

As notary of the approaching green-red spending orgies, the Federal Finance Minister thus diverts over-sized credit authorizations of his predecessor and of the Chancellor so as to be able in the future to squander yet more money on a Green planned economy of climate protection and energy transition. What a start in office, with unserious and unconstitutionally considered financial trickeries!

Four years ago, Herr Lindner, it was still enjoined by you: Better to just not govern than to govern badly. Today the motto reads: The main thing is to sit in the government as stirrup-holder for green-left projects and fantasies of omnipotence. Of the erstwhile spirit of the FDP – it needs here for once be clearly said – is there nothing, as though just nothing of the rest remained.

            Alexander Lambsdorff (FDP): What a nonsense! Hear! Hear!

Amidst these dissonant concerts stands as choirmaster a Chancellor who before all does one thing well: Keeps quiet, before all on his own failings, from Cum-Ex, through Wirecard, to the Warburg Bank’s tax and spend affairs in the millions. And your oracular ambiguities of the Merkel kind do not make the matter better. You say, you were also the Chancellor of the non-vaccinated, and thereby precisely sort out the citizens into brave vaccinated and non-vaccinated deviants who you want to compel to good conduct. Exactly that is the choice of words of a Chancellor of division.

The most striking voter fraud have you committed even before taking office, entering on the vaccination obligation, still high and holy denied a few weeks ago. The supplementary law for the Infection Protection Act was flogged through against all good parliamentary usage, with additional heavy restrictions of basic rights for an unforeseeable time. It is easy to see through why you were so quick about it. The virus of course does not concern itself with your preventive measures, your continual evermore which hitherto has not functioned. You want to establish, beyond the constitution, an undeclared state of permanent exception. And you fear that the panic spread by you may too quickly ebb away if the infection events, even without your doings, again recede.

You use a long-term panic and state of exception so that less will be spoken of what your government otherwise still has on the agenda: A migration policy which even more than the previous government opens the door to migration into the social system, which by means of the grandiose expansion of naturalization [Einbürgerung] and family unification makes irreversible facts, a climate protection policy which is placed above all economic and social areas and which by means of state control and state money distribution flows into socialism and a climate-planned economy and the impoverishment of broad classes of the population, into energy insecurity and foreseeable blackouts, a European policy which wants to know nothing of one’s own national interests, which further constructs the debts and transfer union to the disadvantage of the German taxpayer and which wants to reconstruct the EU into a European Federal State.With this wish for the dissolution of one’s own national state into a European central state, you moreover stand forth fully alone in Europe. According to you, all of this stands under the slogan of “Transformation”.

Yet such a usurpation of power is not the duty of a democratic government which serves the citizens. To the real cares and necessities which revolve about the wholly normal citizens of this country, you have no answer. The inflation runs out of control and impoverishes Mittelstand  and middle-class. The ECB is helpless. It needed to counteract with higher interest rates, yet sits imprisoned in the ruins of a state and business financing of zero and negative interest rates, which besides is actually forbidden to central banks. Instead of relieving the citizens, your government drives taxes as well as fuel and energy prices to the extreme. That is irresponsible, right honorable ladies and gentlemen.

The angst is about the workplace. You however huff and puff in the name of climate protection for a general assault on the productive industrial core and the energy supply of this country. You even look with satisfaction upon the downfall of the automobile and supplier industry and squander tax money for a green-left identity policy with which you create jobs for your lobby groups at the cost of the general public.

The domestic security erodes. Before escalating knife violence, crimes of brutality and the growing insecurity in the streets, you close your eyes. You therefore criminalize with the greater gusto protests critical of the government. While law-abiding citizens may set foot in no restaurant without a vaccination pass, the borders remain open for illegal immigrants, even without identification documents. It is an unsustainable, fully illegal politics which this government aggravates and perpetuates.

Herr Chancellor Scholz, your government in the first days has made abundantly clear where the journey with this coalition shall go. It is a wrong-way drive. Correct this course. Concern yourself for the maintenance of the laws, the reconstruction of justice. Unify this country, instead of further dividing it.

I am grateful.

 

[trans: tem]