Should Germany grant asylum to Russian conscientious objectors? CDU leader Merz is against it and also accuses Ukrainian refugees of exploiting the German social system. Green Jürgen Trittin counters that anyone fleeing the war in Ukraine is not a social tourist.
The foreign policy spokesman for the Greens in the Bundestag, Jürgen Trittin, has sharply criticized CDU leader Friedrich Merz. Merz likes to constantly provide keywords for the right-wing mob with his choice of words, he is stimulating the right-wing edge. “Anyone who flees from a war in Ukraine is not a social tourist,” said Trittin on ntv’s “Frühstart”.
Merz had told Bild-TV that there was “social tourism” by Ukrainian refugees to Germany in order to benefit from unemployment benefit II payments here. The federal government had decided that Ukrainian refugees would not be treated under the Asylum Seekers Benefits Act. Merz added: “We would have a bigger problem with refugees from Russia if the federal government did what the interior minister suggested.”
Trittin also sharply criticized this statement by Merz. Anyone who prevents Russian war-obsessors from obtaining asylum in Germany is “running the business of warmonger Vladimir Putin,” said Trittin. Of course, the Russian war resisters would have to be accepted, “because Putin is forcing anyone we don’t accept at gunpoint to kill Ukrainians – what’s the point of that?” said Trittin.
In the case of the sudden leak in the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, Trittin assumes that there was a violent disruption. The pipeline is “relatively new and built from solid and good German steel”. If such a pipeline suddenly leaks, “then there must have been a violent disruption of this pipeline.” Now it must be investigated whether this was an attack.
Regarding the gas levy, Trittin said it was politically dead. The only question left was how to bury it. He rejected the fact that the responsibility for the levy lay with the Green Economics Minister Robert Habeck. The gas levy was a joint proposal from the Federal Chancellor, the Federal Minister of Finance and the Federal Minister for Economic Affairs, “I must be very surprised when the Federal Minister of Finance describes the gas levy he passed himself as a Habeck botch, but then claims that it is constitutional. It definitely is Not.”
There are considerable constitutional concerns, since the levy in the planned nationalization would in fact be a tax. In order to bury the surcharge, measures are now needed to cap the price of gas for basic needs. A gas price brake should under no circumstances encourage gas wastage. “As a federal republic, we have to save a good fifth of our gas requirements in absolute terms, because otherwise we would be buying away the gas that has become scarcer from everyone else in the world,” said Trittin. The current policy has already led to conflicts with many poorer countries, “we simply bought the gas from them.”
Even a renaissance of nuclear power cannot help in the current situation, said Trittin. The result of the stress test was very clear: “None of this is a substitute for gas.” The nuclear power plant in Lingen would definitely be shut down anyway, since there was no power shortage in northern Germany. “In northern Germany, even in the worst scenarios, we have to regularly switch off wind farms and pay money for it because there is too much electricity in the grid.” One reason for this is that Bavaria has blocked power lines from northern Germany to the south. The electricity problem in the south is accordingly “self-inflicted”.
