German
Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/40, pp. 3916-3918.
Right
honorable Frau President. Right honorable Herr Chancellor. Right honorable
ladies and gentlemen.
It is really
nice that you of the opposition and of the government so well understand one
another that you have found a compromise. Yet all of these motions are simply
not before us. Have we been sleeping or have you slept? What is it here
actually? Put forward the motions so we here can reasonably vote thereon!
But back to
the budget – yes, it is a budget debate. Herr Merz has spoken little of the
budget. Yet this budget is a document of aloofness, of denial of reality, and
of ignorance in the face of the state of the country and its people.
The
government coalition presumes to save the world, to unilaterally newly regulate
the energy supply for an industrial country and to regulate the climate in 50
or 100 years; yet one’s own country and its people are ruined.
You speak of
“change of times” [Zeitenwende], yet you
do nothing about it. You encapsulate yourselves in your ideological fantasies
of climate protection, energy transition, multiculturalism, diversity, and
refuse to look at reality.
Saskia Esken (SPD): You love time!
Germany is
stuck in a fundamental economic, financial and state crisis which exceeds all
those previously known.
And you
nevertheless expend the money with open hands. You distribute it to all the
world: Climate billions for India here, weapons billions for the Ukraine there.
You inflate the state apparatus still further; you create new government posts
and grandiosely approve still more positions in the ministries and
administrations. On that account, only consolation and alibi politics remain
for one’s own citizens and taxpayers.
The Germans
pay the highest taxes and duties in the Western world. For that, they receive
miserable pensions and an increasingly disfunctional state, a state which is
ever less in the position to look after its core duties – the preservation of
the state of law and public order, the guaranteeing of domestic and external
security – yet which ever more audaciously and overbearingly meddles in the
private lives of the citizens, browbeats them, and for that grasps ever deeper
into the pocket.
The crisis in
which our country is stuck has not fallen from heaven; it has been politically
made. Inflation, energy scarcity, exploding energy prices, distorted supply
chains, lack of skilled labor and overburdened social security accounts are the
consequence of politically false decisions. And, no, you cannot shove off the
responsibility for that onto Putins’ aggressive war.
The origins
lie deeper. The fatally flawed decisions were arrived at earlier and they
primarily have been cast [gefallen] in
Berlin and Brussels. The galloping inflation is the receipt for excessive
indebtedness and the money trough and zero interest rate policy of the European
Central Bank for the subvention of the highly indebted states of Europe. Eight
percent inflation means: Savings balances, reserves and pension claims after
six years are worth only half. Real wages decline as a consequence of
inflation. Almost 40 percent of Germans simply no longer know how they shall
pay for their subsistence. What have you actually said to that? What have you
offered in the way of solutions? Nothing! Yet more bureaucratic redistribution
is all that the Ampel has to offer. Gas
rebates, nine euro tickets, one time extra allowances or climate money are an
expensive, bureaucratic brief heat which brings nothing and – I need so simply
say it – which are only to conceal your own incompetence.
Rising energy
prices further heat up the inflation and drive the Mittelstand and middle class into poverty. The German energy crisis
has a name: The energy transition [Energiewende].
Simultaneous withdrawal from coal and atomic, fickle electricity from wind and
sun as a replacement for a baseload-capable, advantageous energy supply as we
once had in this country; and in that regard, the newest idea from the House of
Habeck is the removal of natural gas infrastructure for the heating of
dwellings. That could and can not go well.
Yet you
mis-use the war in the Ukraine so as to accelerate this wrong way, to burn
still more money for that, and to drive forward still more destruction of
nature by means of monstrous windmills. The German energy costs are now already
the highest of all industrial countries, whether with or without the Ukraine
war. The energy transition has failed and needs to be most promptly corrected.
And for that
you must come to the acknowledgment that the energy sanctions against Russia
are counter-productive and inflict more damage on our own country than on
Russia, right honorable ladies and gentlemen. As a result of the voluntary
renunciation of overland petroleum deliveries – this for once needs to be
presented – you endanger the fuel supply in eastern Germany and load still higher
energy prices onto the citizens.
To the
threatening collapse of the social security system, of which the Federal Audit
Authority has warned in an alarm report, you have in any case no answer.
Uncontrolled migration solves neither the skilled labor shortage nor the
demography problem, and certainly not when the indiscriminate migration from
foreign cultural circles of the uneducated and those not able to integrate is
permitted
Amira Mohamed Ali (Linke): Shamelessness! Shame on you, Frau Weidel!
and is even
promoted.
On the other
hand, one million people in the past year have emigrated from Germany. Not a
few are highly qualified who have been lost forever. This brain drain you
accept with a shrug
Jan Korte (Linke): You yourself know about that!
and continue
setting up negative incentives for qualified employees.
Saskia Esken (SPD): Where do you actually live, Frau Weidel?
Thus appears
the policy. Of the asylum immigrants since 2016 – keyword, “We can do it” [„Wir schaffen das”] – around one million – one million!
– are still additional boarders in the our social system. What are you doing?
By removal of the sanctions possibilities, you are re-working the Hartz-IV
benefits into a de facto basic income.
Matthias W. Birkwald (Linke): You have not the least idea of a basic income!
And you want
to open the access to these benefits in the next step not only for Ukrainian
war refugees but also for all asylum immigrants. That means you are even
accelerating this trend of unqualified immigration. On the other hand, who has
worked 45 years at an average gross wage of 24,000 euros per year lands
straight on the level of Hartz-IV, and you do nothing to alleviate this obvious
imbalance and place the pension system on a durable basis. And that is the
pauper’s oath for this social democratic Ampel
government.
We actually
need an authentic change of the times in German politics, and that means a
departure from ideological illusions and a concentration of state duties and
outlays on the essentials. It is right and overdue to approach the Bundeswehr’s
armaments and investments obstruction with additional outlays. For decades, the
army was neglected and underfunded. For that, all of you, primarily however
your party, Herr Merz, bear the responsibility. For 16 long years, the Union
appointed the Chancellor and the Defense Minister. It is thus really more than
hypocritical to here cast yourselves as rescuers and guardians of the Bundeswehr.
And to re-work the Soli, as Herr Merz
has plainly set forth here, as a special tax for the repair of your own
underfunded Bundeswehr, that is a slap in the face of every taxpayer.
The designation
“special assets” [„Sondervermögen”]
for additional debts is in any case misleading. Why do you name this
"special assets”? They are special debts. That would be more honest. That this expenditure is to be
anchored in the Basic Law so as to subtract it from the general state
indebtedness is an unnecessary and crooked balance trick, and that you quite
precisely know.
It would be
better – the AfD stands for this – to eliminate superfluous posts from the
budget. We are speaking here of a record volume for the budget. Eliminate superfluous
posts and concentrate the state expenditures on the essentials! No one can assert
that no latitude for that was at hand. The
state in Germany has not too little money but too much – perhaps you understand
this concept – and it sets false priorities for these expenditures. That is
what it is about.
The bloated
estimate of the Health Ministry, quadruple the pre-Corona budget, is by no means
to be justified. The overcharged Health Minister is thus allowed to order additional
billions of unnecessary vaccine doses and to instigate irrelevant mass testing.
Our country surely has other concerns than the new edition of fact-free
restrictions of the basic rights and unlawful vaccination campaigns.
Much money
will be expended for censorship measures, control of opinion – there, you are
the frontrunner – and the so-called fight against the rightists. Pressing,
authentic security problems will on that account be downplayed, primarily when it
is a question of imported criminality.
Germany needs
neither new taxes nor new debts so as to return to good health. We need the
return to solid state finances, and that requires more than the inconsequential
tweets of this Federal Finance Minister.
If we rather
pulp some of the pet projects of green and leftist ideology and clientele
politics, then we also have money for relief of the people. Let us leave to the
citizens their hard earned money in their own wallets. It is best stored up
there.
If we again
give precedence to the civil and the business freedom, instead of patronization
and control mania, dear Ampel
coalition, we may turn back to Realpolitik
and place the interests of our own country exactly there where they belong, and
indeed in the first place.
I am grateful.
[trans: tem]
