Tino Chrupalla, June 1, 2022, Budget

German Bundestag, June 1, 2022, Plenarprotokoll 20/40, pp. 3931-3933.

Right honorable Frau President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen. Dear countrymen.

The German Bundestag has been called upon to pass the Federal 2022 budget. We deliberate this week on a new indebtedness in a dizzying [schwindelerregender] sum of approximately 139 billion euros. The planned expenditures thereby grow to nearly 500 billion euros.

Valued Herr Chancellor, when could you as head of government of this Ampel coalition actually end a work day with the conscience of having brought our country forward? For one thing I need say: The responsibility for the desolate state of our country rightly weighs heavily on your shoulders. As a former Federal Finance Minister and a Social Democrat, you and your predecessors in office have paved the ground for an economic and financial policy far from reality.

We experience here and today the economic and social decline of Germany and its citizens. How is your reaction to that? Either the Chancellor is not heard or seen, or one hears from a former Federal President that one can also freeze for peace. Precisely that is unworthy, ladies and gentlemen, unworthy in the face of the country for which you as Federal government have undertaken responsibility, and before all unworthy in the face of the people who day by day contribute to the creation of value in Germany and thereby to the well-being of our society.

The CDU moreover does not fall short of you. Herr Merz, you yourself have spoken on the ARD of an end of our prosperity for a given time. That sounds to me as if the CDU had already given up on Germany and lost belief in itself; for the Christian Democrats and also you, Herr Merz, have not brought forward solutions. You have spoken not a word for the German citizens, not a word for the taxpayers in this country.

Ladies and gentlemen, both of these politicians today bring in their own harvest. Look about you in our country! You will foremost acknowledge the results of a misguided policy of the last decades when you go through our country. These step forward ever more strongly into the foreground and no longer allow themselves to be hushed. For example, the split between the structurally strong regions and the structurally weak regions still deepens. We all know: For scarcely any Mittelstand firm is it at all still attractive to establish itself long-term in a structurally weak region. Here for years the German state has not fulfilled its basic duty, that is to say: Construction and maintenance of infrastructure, transportation networks of roads and railways, broadband construction, healthcare and education are some of the cornerstones which simply must be present. It is the duty of the governments in the States and in the Bund to create the basic prerequisites so that also small and Mittelstand businesses and especially the trades [Handwerk] can exist.

What actually is your idea for Germany and the continent of Europe in the next 20 years, valued Federal government? How will we live and work after the so-called energy transition? How further does it go? In that regard, you keep completely silent. With that ends the one-sided utopia of the Ampel coalition, ladies and gentlemen. Which industries for example will still exist in Germany and which will we need to develop? How will people in this country earn their money? Who in this country will at all still work creating value? To these questions we already for long hear no more words from you. With your politics, you drive only by sight. And further: What shall we advise the succeeding generations? What would you advise your children, which calling should they learn, to which studies should they apply themselves? How do the job descriptions of the future actually appear?

Do you still at all invest a thought in these important inquiries? We and many German citizens in any case cannot presently recognize it. Your policy, valued Federal government, completely abolishes Germany and Europe as an independent economic and educational area secured for the future.

As if that is not enough, these Federal governments for years seek to solve the structural problems with new public debts, naturally also in this budget. As Alternative für Deutschland, we have steadily and constantly been of the opinion that you are thereby steering our country into an inflation. And also here we are to be right, ladies and gentlemen. For the rising prices of the goods of daily needs and of fuel, the citizens have you to thank. You should actually be ashamed to cover up the results of your deficient policy with the cloak of the Ukraine war. You all here know that the money press of the ECB for years runs at high speed so as to veil the abuses! Precisely that is the principal reason: The money supply in Europe.    

Now comes the agreed upon oil embargo. And that will weaken us here in Europe. In the petroleum refineries of Schwedt and Leuna and throughout the regions of economic power workplaces will be lost. For months, this ideologically deluded Federal government persists in its standpoint. Even so long, we bring to your attention real savings potentials. You nevertheless are not all at interested in an honest audit. To compare revenues and expenditures is not wanted.

In that regard, it would be possible that you save over 100 billion euros in the energy and climate funds by means of a reimbursement of the asylum reserve or an orderly foreign and development policy in German interests. And the EU bureaucracy monster is not allowed to be further heedlessly fed. Were only a portion of these proposals taken into account, we could relieve the state budget. Much more, these volumes of money would also be free for the financing of the Bundeswehr – without taking up new debts and without altering the Basic Law – or so as to invest in the chronically under-financed social security systems. We of course owe that to the citizens who use a large part of their income for that each month and also thereby maintain the social state.

Yet this Federal government reacts as usual thoughtfully and initially announces a one-time relief packet. That of course sounds really great and nice. Not only is it long awaited, it first of all serves as ideological building blocks and attempts with a nine euro ticket to remove the citizens during the summer months from their autos to public transportation [ÖPNV]. Again of course can only those profit therefrom which still operate buses and trains. The infrastructurally weak regions will again be uncoupled. Frau Haßelmann, you are welcome to come to my constituency, Görlitz.   

            Britta Haßelmann (Greens): I was there already! Without informing you!

A weekly bus runs there. You can then go there for once for nine euros. This is the reason: The people there have purely nothing to do with this short-term symbol politics. They of course have designated for their own provision their own autos.

Here especially it concerns as it happens the elders in our country, those as it happens whom we have to thank for our prosperity. Those who have built our country will, for thanks from the government, be humiliated and forgotten.Yet just these people require our support, deserve our esteem; and those people also have deserved relief.  

Yes, the price spiral ever further turns. High fuel prices will have as a consequence higher foodstuff prices. The production prices already lie above the trade prices. Finally take hold of pragmatic solutions which matter to the citizens and businesses! Set aside the value-added tax on basic foodstuffs! Create a relief in the wage and income taxes by means of a raise in the basic allowance! And yet again: The CO₂ duty ought to be abolished.

We ourselves here in the German Bundestag need to finally expedite the election law reform. Had this parliament the appropriate number of 598 members, in place of 736, we could save 100 million euros annually. That would contribute to the citizens’ trust in our parliamentary work and could even positively affect the election participation. You apparently just do not want this.

            Vice-president Petra Pau: You please need come to a conclusion.

Last sentence, Frau President. – Valued colleagues, it can and may not be a further so. We require a politics in which our citizens are thought of first, just like Germany.

Many thanks.

 

[trans: tem]

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

Alice Weidel, June 1, 2022, Budget

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]