Anja Arndt, April 1, 2025, Christians in the Congo

EU Parliament, Strasbourg, P10 CRE-REV(2025)04-01(2-0571-0000). 

Frau President. 

On February 12^th occurred in the Congo a horrific massacre: Seventy Christians – men, women and children – were kidnapped by the Islamist ADF militia and in barbaric ways and means murdered with machetes and hammers. This Islamist brutality is no single instance. I thank the Commission that it makes this terror a theme here, and finally commits itself to the religious freedom and security of Christians. 

In the Congo, 95 percent of the population are Christians; in Europe, it is 72 percent. Despite this overwhelming majority, they are selectively eradicated. And with us, Islamist murders as in Aschaffenburg, Mannheim und Solingen are a gruesome reality. My compassion is for all victims and relatives among us, in the Congo and in the entire world. 

The EU needs to come to terms with this violence. It needs to be the advocate of the Christians – with more secure borders, a clearer rigor against Islamists and an authentic protection. Germany needs the AfD, and Europe needs the Europe of Sovereign Nations. 

 

[trans: tem]

Bernd Baumann, March 18, 2025, Debt and Democracy

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/214, p. 27736. 

Frau President. Ladies and gentlemen. 

A new great coalition of Union, SPD and Greens had the Budget Committee called in last  Sunday so as to vote on a gigantic debts package of 1,000 billion euros. Yet the final statutory proposal reached the members just one day previously with profound innovations. Suddenly to be taken up is the compulsion for climate neutrality in the Basic Law. Climate neutrality, this central dogma of leftist-green ideologues, destroys the competitiveness of our industry. No other country does something similar to its economy. 

Members of the AfD, SPD and BSW thus demanded an immediate hearing in committee, which the committee chairman would have needed to grant, since the necessary quorum was attained. That was compulsory. Yet the committee chairman, Helge Braun – former chief of the Chancellery Office and intimate of Angela Merkel – refused and forced the immediate waving through of the debts package. What a parliamentary low point, ladies and gentlemen! 

Yet why this flogging through? Because already in the coming week the newly elected Bundestag meets. But it has new majorities which the people want. It would thereby completely reject the mega-debts and Basic Law alterations. And the new Bundestag is the legitimate one, which reflected the majorities, ladies and gentlemen. Yet why does the new Bundestag meet just one month after the election, even though such fundamental decisions should now be passed? The Union and the SPD have rammed this through the seniors council. Against the will of all other delegations, Bundestag President Bas called in the new Bundestag just at the last possible moment. 

The entirety ultimately shows the true spirit, the true character primarily of Friedrich Merz who in this way wants to become Chancellor. 

            Stephan Brandner (AfD): “Whatever it takes!”

With a trillion in debt, approved by a Bundestag long since voted out of office, he wants to buy the Chancellorship with the SPD and Greens – like in a banana republic, ladies and gentlemen. 

And we thereby have still not spoken of the gigantic election fraud. I cite Herr Merz: I will put an end to this politics of leftist and green spin doctors. I cite CDU Secretary-general Linnemann: New debts are not to be made with the CDU; with us, there is no alteration of the debt brake because that is our deepest conviction. 

Ladies and gentlemen, who wants to lead the democracy ad absurdum, needs not falsify the ballots, as Erdoğan and Putin have been accused of. He just so robs democracy of every substance when by such false promises he deceives the voters, thus swindles their votes, and then does the opposite. 

 

[trans: tem]

Hans Neuhoff, April 1, 2025, EU Foreign and Security Policy

EU Parliament, Strasbourg, P10 CRE-REV(2025)04-01(2-0186-0000). 

Frau President. 

The Union’s foreign and security policy is a jumble of distorted perception and moralistic extravagance. Islamism in the reporting of the European Peoples Party is not worth a syllable. In Germany, Christmas markets, carnival rides, train stations need to be defended against Islamist perpetrators of violence, not from Russian infantrymen. What does the EU do? You finance a Taliban emirate in Syria. 

Russia is not the enemy of Europe. Russia is a defensive empire which sees itself existentially threatened by the expansion of NATO into the Donbass and the south Caucasus. Who does not understand that and arms for a holy war against Russia, he leads us into ruin. 

Ceterum censeo, the Europe of Sovereign Nations delegation rejects Ukraine’s membership in NATO and in the EU. The future of the Ukraine can alone consist in its return to neutrality. 

 

[trans: tem]

Michael Espendiller, March 18, 2025, Debt and Defense Spending

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/214, pp. 27767-27768. 

Right honorable Frau President. Right honorable colleagues. Dear viewers in the hall, on YouTube, and on X. 

The election fraudster Friedrich Merz, today in common with SPD and Greens, is having determined in six days as much new debt as the entire Federal Republic of Germany in total took up from 1950 until 2009, thus in 59 years. It will be, in ten years time, between 1.6 and 1.8 trillion euros. Most already surmise that with this money everything possible will happen, yet in the end it will not arrive at the citizens. 

On this there prevails a widespread consensus that the so-called infrastructure special debts are to be refused because infrastructure belongs to the regular state orders which the state has to finance from its current income. Yet there persists the erroneous belief that in the case of the Bundeswehr it would be different. I want for my delegation to here again clarify: Defense expenditures also need be defrayed from the regular budget if we want to economize efficiently and responsibly. 

All economists agree that Germany needs fundamental structural reform, that we need to rein in the bureaucracy and initiate a growth impulse. And all are agreed that in that regard it does not help to simply pour more money over the problem, as has been done without success in the past years. Why should it be different in regards the Bundeswehr? 

I have attended in the last three years as reporter for section 14 the regular expenditures in the defense area as well as the “Special Funds Bundeswehr”, and I can say to you: Our problem here is not primarily the money. Of that, the Defense Ministry now has so much that it routinely affords itself money squandering. Did you know, for example, that we spend each year 654 million euros for the so-called property security [Liegenschaften]? What is that? That is the cost for the private security services which guard [bewachen] our barracks, because that is evidently no longer to be expected of our soldiers. And we yearly pay from the Federal budget around 180,000 soldiers, the fewest of whom are on active duty. It is not known what they do all day long, yet the guarding of our barracks is apparently not a part of it. 

Or let us go to the procurement theme. In regards procurement projects also we routinely pay too much, for one thing because our government simply negotiates poorly, for another because the Federal Ministry of Defense’s requirements are set completely wrong. An example is the infantry’s heavy weapons carrier. Here, we procure the Boxer from Rheinmetall which shall replace the weapons carrier system Wiesel 2 which has been in service for around 30 years. So far, so good. Actually, the Boxer could quite easily be purchased in Germany, because it is also produced by us. Only, Rheinmetall was unfortunately at the time of the order fully booked in its  German production. One would thus need to wait somewhat longer. That besides would have been fully justifiable. But no, the Russians who lose the last two years in the Ukraine, are, ja, next week in Berlin. Thus Pistorius decided to purchase the Boxer at Rheinmetall Australia and from there have it flown in. The result: The originally planned 2 billion euros for the project does not suffice. The finance requirement climbs around 700 million euros to 2.7 billion euros. 

            Alice Weidel (AfD): Madness! Anyone can figure that!

And the flight from Australia is besides not climate neutral. 

I have only four minutes speaking time, yet I could recount for hours additional examples. 

An evaluation in the Federal Ministry of Defense does not routinely occur, neither for the use of funds and for the procurement, nor for our military doctrine. 

            Henning Otte (CDU/CSU): Who then wrote your speech for you?

The Bundeswehr needs to correspond in structure and character to the altered demands of our time. Yet at the Bendlerblock is ever still a mindset of 50 years ago. And we do not change that when we now write into the Basic Law in the defense area an indebtedness possibility completely without upper limit. 

Also in the military area it remains as in the sentence: Germany has an expenditure problem and not an income problem. We will at some time look back on this day and ascertain that it did not bring us much other than debts and inflation. 

Thanks for the attention. 

 

[trans: tem]

Marc Jongen, March 31, 2025, Academic Freedom

EU Parliament, Strasbourg, P10 CRE-REV(2025)03-31(1-0158-0000). 

Madam President, so the Trump administration in the United States is threatening academic freedom? This claim by the European Commission and some MEPs here is pure hypocrisy. Where was the outcry from the EU and the academia in Europe when more and more non-leftist scientists in the US were dismissed or forced to resign by their radical colleagues and the left-wing student mob simply because they didn't bow to the woke ideology? Bret Weinstein, Joseph Manson and Mike Adams even committed suicide. The wokeness virus has taken over US academia and in Europe it's also widespread, including its cancel culture. 

If President Trump now takes action against the intolerant and unscientific gender ideology, if he stops DEI programmes that discriminate white people and also restricts the dogmatic, almost religious climate research, then he's taking measures that help restore scientific freedom, not suppress it. We need such measures in Europe too.

 

Alexander Gauland, March 18, 2025, Merz, CDU and Germany

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/214, pp. 27761-24462. 

Frau President. Ladies and gentlemen. 

In the course of this debate, on the previous Thursday as well as today, much which is correct and also false has been said. A new assessment by me is therefore not needed. Allow me then to make a couple of personal remarks. 

Herr Merz and I were for many years in the same party. I went, because I could no longer bear the destruction by Angela Merkel of the CDU as a conservative-liberal, bürgerliche alternative to the left-green mainstream. Herr Merz was a victim of her will to power. 

I grant, ladies and gentlemen, that I therefore expected much of his return to politics: A different economic and social policy, a reversal of false developments, like the illegal mass immigration to the exit from atomic power and the combustion engine. 

            Andreas Mattfeldt (CDU/CSU): That is coming! All comes!

My idea – you call it a vision – was that Germany receives a Politik of reason and judgment, thus a middle-right Politik, like many people in this country wish it as evidenced by the election results. 

            Andreas Mattfeldt (CDU/CSU): Yet you have only a hostile goal!

Instead, Herr Merz, you’ve erected a firewall, which today and in the future makes you prisoners of left-green social alterations. So as to get into the Chancellor’s Office, you have sacrificed everything that was still conservative or bürgerlich in the CDU, and your voters to whom you gave your word on the debt brake, you have betrayed with billions of euros at the pump. Seldom, ladies and gentlemen, has bügerlicher decency been so quickly replaced by political cynicism. 

Herr Merz, that you do not listen to me is fully clear. Yet you would have been able to listen to Andreas Rödder, the earlier chairman of your basic values commission, who in the Welt am Sonntag wrote precisely the same in the album of the CDU. 

You will, Herr Merz, apparently become Chancellor with a Politik like we have experienced in recent years. And this Politik will exactly so fail as that of the subsiding Ampel. Not even your transatlantic allies in Washington support your dubious efforts to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s answers. Such a change of times [Zeitenwende], dear Herr Merz, will only be with us, not with the failures of yesterday. 

And if in recent years I ever again had doubt in my own party, today I am proud and glad to have stood with others as godparent to it in the year 2013. For since this week is it clear: The Merz CDU is the continuation of the Merkel CDU – a further so, Herr Merz, in Germany’s downfall, for which you in the future need to answer. 

I am grateful. 

 

[trans: tem]