German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/84,
pp. 9957-9959.
Right honorable Herr President. Right honorable Herr
Chancellor. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.
Herr Scholz, can you actually in the morning calmly look in
the mirror, thinking of the concentrated incompetence and cascade of blunders
for which the Federal government lead by you stands?
Achim Post (SPD-Minden): Helau! Helau!
You afford yourself a Foreign Minister who in her
dilettantism on the international stage plainly announced a declaration of war
on Russia which unleashed spite and shock in the rest of the world. A Foreign Minister
who feels herself responsible for not only the entire world but also for
countries which, I cite: “lie hundreds of thousands of kilometers distant”;
that is, anywhere out there in the solar system. Unbelievable!
Economy Minister Habeck presently deals worldwide in matters
of climate protection, announces bombastic delivery agreements which similarly
again burst apart, and quite openly dreams of having Germany dissolve into an
EU federal state governed from Brussels.
– You say “exactly”! That
is exactly what you want!
We certainly do not speak for the first time of your shortly
to be part-time Interior Minister who thinks of abusing her office in the next
three-quarters of a year as an election campaign platform and safety belt. Her
actual duty, the safety of the citizens, she has already for long neglected for
her obsession with a fight against the right, for her opening of the last
migration sluice gates in line with the unspeakable naturalization law.
Or your Health Minister Lauterbach, long since become a
tragi-comic caricature, who evidently is still occupied with putting the blame
on others for his Corona blind flight and his failures in regards all other
duties.
Such a cabinet no one can take seriously. Under your
government, Germany ultimately becomes the laughing stock of the world, and in
the eyes of neutral observers becomes ever more like a developing country. In
this regard, you really are the worthy successor of Angela Merkel.
The foreign policy shoes of earlier Chancellors – we think of
Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Schmidt – are anyhow too big for you. Time and
again, in questions which are of decisive importance for the future of our
country, you let let yourself be led about like a schoolboy.
You stand there dumb as the President of the United States
boasted [auftrumpfte] before the
world press that the U.S.A. had the means of preventing the opening of the
Baltic Sea Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Around half a year after the explosion
of both pipelines, you are still silent as to those responsible for this public
act of state terrorism.
U.S. vice foreign minister Victoria Nuland’s jubilation that
an infrastructure vital for Germany’s energy supply is just, I cite: “a piece of
metal on the seabed” might perhaps be an answer. Yet the citizens of this country
expect a clarification from you of who has perpetrated this attack on a
lifeline of German industry. And they want to hear from you what you are in
fact undertaking so as to again make possible the supply of Germany by
favorable and viable energy carriers, and from Russia.
Liquid gas from the U.S.A. at overpriced costs is no
solution.
The exploding prices for energy imports, together with the
high inflation unleashed by the ECB, are the reason for, the origin of the loss
of real purchasing power taken out of the net pay of the Bund’s citizens at a
level of 4 percent last year. Such a loss of prosperity is unexampled in the
history of Germany. Unexampled! It drives the middle class into impoverishment
and the productive industry into the arms of the American solicitors who, with
low taxes and low energy costs, at the same time woo it with the protectionism
of their own American industry. One must picture that! And yet you still abet
this de-industrialization! The windmills with which your government wants to
still further stuff this country are in any case no solution. They are
subvention graves and money destruction machines which will intensify our
energy problems. When no wind blows, 50,000 or 100,000 windmills deliver
exactly as little electricity as the present 30,000 which already disfigure our
country. The so-called renewable sources of energy presently contribute less to
Germany’s electricity supply than the last three remaining nuclear power plants.
To disconnect them would be economic suicide.
– You of the SPD laugh. We can picture that. Since you so
often attack from behind the citizens and the economy and declare the
disconnection debate to be ended. Germany requires the comeback of nuclear
energy. Yes, of course we require it. Tomorrow ask the other government heads
in Brussels, Herr Chancellor! No one finds the German anti-nuclear power mania
to be good, no one wants to follow you in this way. You now also receive pressure
from the European partners due to your irresponsible asylum and naturalization
policy. We rejoice at the summit!
Take the lead, Herr Scholz as you, ja, always do, exactly as with the fatal decision for the delivery of
combat panzers to the Ukraine! Your initial hesitation honors you. Yet in the
end you have let yourself be compelled by the warmongers in your own ranks and
on the other side of the Atlantic
Achim Post (SPD-Minden): Man, man, man!
to take this step and to make Germany – now I want to say
something to you – a de facto war party in a war which is not ours. That is
what it’s about!
Achim Post (SPD-Minden): All dumb stuff!
And look: Your excellent partners are no longer at all so
hasty with the delivery of their panzers!
Götz Frömming (AfD): All at once!
They are no longer at all so hasty. The U.S.A. wants to
deliver its panzers just in a year, and slimmed down. Yet you have demanded of the
new Defense Minister, whom you have somehow mobilized as a last conscription, to
declare to one of the few functioning panzer companies that they must give up their
modern and mission-ready combat panzers. And that there are at all modern and
mission-ready combat panzers in the Bundeswehr after 16 Merkel years is, ja, just as so astonishing. That needs
be said for once.
Thus, Herr Merz, instead of always shoving everything on to
others: You were for 16 years in the government and have economized all of that
lock, stock and barrel.
And when you speak of the Bundeswehr’s special fund which
has been passed here: That was agreed to to strengthen the Bundeswehr and not
to make a gift of whichever combat panzers to the Ukraine as we are surely
doing.
You draw on the Bundeswehr and undermine our defense
capability so as to prolong the war in the Ukraine and to make a target of Germany.
Alexander Lambsdorff (FDP): On that account we put 100 billion in the Bundeswehr! You know not of what you speak!
You make Germany a target while the U.S. arms industry, at a
safe distance, does a very good business.
The enthusiasm for weapons deliveries to the Ukraine and for
the economic sanctions against Russia which, as is well known, harm Germany and
Europe more than Russia, remains confined to the U.S.A. and its European
followers. In the rest of the world, one pursues one’s own interests. Your
socialist comrade Lula has lately demonstrated that to you on your trip to Brazil
as he once again led you about in front of all the world.
Brazil has no interest in a climate policy according to
German notions which lead straightaway to de-industrialization and loss of
prosperity. Brazil also has no interest in a green ideology plaything like that
unworldly bureaucracy monster, the supply chain law, which hinders free trade.
Brazil does not want to become a war party by means of weapons deliveries, but
to throw its weight on the scales, exactly as do India and China, to negotiate
a peace agreement for the Ukraine. Such an initiative would have been able to
come from you, Herr Chancellor, and it has long since needed to come from
Germany.
For once do not ask the couch strategists from the coalition
delegations and the Union who have not served, ask experienced military people:
Neither the Ukraine nor Russia will be able to achieve their maximum goals in
this war. So as to end it, they will sooner or later need to negotiate a
compromise. The question is, How many people until then need die, until then how
much destruction and suffering will be served up? You cannot compel an atomic
power into a total defeat without risking blowing up the world. The worry,
ridiculed by you, of an escalation of the war into an atomic war which haunts
many people, is not irrational.
Vice-president Wolfgang Kubicki: Come to a conclusion please.
It is real.
And the great SPD foreign policy politician Egon Bahr – you once
had great foreign policy politicians –
Vice-president Wolfgang Kubicki: Frau colleague, please come to a conclusion.
– I come to an end, Herr President – often emphasized what
Otto von Bismarck also well knew, what your coalition partners, as is known,
want to cancel: States have no friends, but states have interests.
Alexander Lambsdorff (FDP): We would today not be re-unified if that applied!
Thus represent the interests of the Federal Republic of
Germany, Herr Chancellor. In that regard, I wish you much success.
Many thanks.
[trans: tem]
