German AfD leader and Chancellor candidate Alice Weidel had a long interview with German paper BILD.
Needless to say, it was quite adversarial.
But you will not see it below, because I think the real fire was in Weidel’s statements: clear, unambiguous and unafraid.
Hatred towards her has become common-place, as she has to send her family to live in Switzerland, and can’t live in her house, having a high-risk level, can’t even go shopping.
Weidel approached CDU’s Friedrich Merz, supposed favorite for next Chancellor, with ‘an open hand’ and a warning: doing a coalition with current government’s Greens and Olaf Scholz’s SPD is VOTER FRAUD.
Weidel: “We have two large bars in the polls – the black [CDU] and the blue [AfD]. It is the will of the voters that we have a blue-black coalition. Then we would also have stable majorities and could finally make politics for our country and not against it. Since Friedrich Merz has ruled out a coalition with the AfD, he can only work with the Greens and with the SPD. In other words, what he is doing right now is nothing more than voter deception, even voter fraud. (…) Voters simply have to know that if they vote for Friedrich Merz, that they will get the Greens, a Habeck as Minister of Economic Affairs – that’s just part of it.”
The reporter wants to bully her for the common-sense policies of wanting ‘undisturbed trade with Russia’, lifting of the sanctions and repairing the Nord Stream pipelines.
Weidel: “We want to have very good relations with our European neighbors. (…) But we also want to have a very good relationship with the great powers. This includes Russia. (…) Until two years ago, we purchased cheap natural gas from Russia through a Nord Stream consortium. (…) What we want is to end a sanctions policy that is above all one thing: damaging to our country. We have the highest energy prices in the world. We are no longer competitive.”
Reporter insists that she denounces the Russian threats to Germany.
Weidel: “But we did it the other way around all the time. Friedrich Merz has threatened to deliver Taurus. He used it to advertise. […] Donald Trump doesn’t have [a critical word for Russia] either. You have to sit down at the negotiating table. You have to talk to each other. We as the AfD have said nothing else, that we must enter into peace negotiations. And I think that alone is serious politics. And above all, we must end a self-damaging sanctions policy at all costs.”
The reporter wants to talk about ‘remigration’, that for some groups it means to also expel Germans with a migration background.
Weidel: “The term remigration means the implementation of law and order. Since 2015, for ten years, the government has been violating the law here. People can come to our country illegally. They are not deported, even though they are here illegally and/or commit crimes. And we say very clearly: We have to close the borders. We must control our borders and reject illegals. We have to expel criminals. Right away. They are not allowed to be here at all. And so do illegal residents. Nothing else means remigration. There is no talk of [legal migrants turned citizens] at all. (…) People who go to work here, who pay taxes here, are very welcome. We are also happy to give them citizenship.”
One good question: AfD wants more money for the Bundeswehr, more money for pensions. They also want to reduce income, corporate, sales and energy taxes, as well as abolish property tax, acquisition tax, and real estate transfer tax.
How on Earth do you make this work financially? Unfortunately for the reporter Weidel had a good answer.
Weidel: “We also want to abolish the CO₂ levy. Above all, we want to abolish the Renewable Energy Sources Act, the EEG, which has so far cost us around 500 billion euros. That is about 20 billion annually in the budget. Then there is also the fact that the network has to be expanded – according to estimates by institutes, this is around 460 billion euros. That would bring us to almost a trillion euros in subsidy payments for unprofitable renewable energies. If you delete that, you will have almost financed it. If you then no longer pay citizen’s money and social benefits to foreign citizens who have never paid into our coffers, then you come to about 135 billion in savings, then they even have a surplus.”
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