The deputy leader of the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), one of the three partners in Germany’s ruling ‘traffic light’ coalition, has launched yet another scathing attack against the left-liberal Greens and Social Democrats, which wield the lion’s share of the power in the coalition, trashing their positions on illegal immigration, energy policy, and their plans to hand out massive sums of money to citizens.
In recent statements given to the German tabloid newspaper BILD, Wolfgang Kubicki, the vice chairman of the FDP who also serves as the vice president of the Bundestag, described the governing coalition’s migration policy as “an absolute piece from the madhouse,” adding that its financing of a migrant NGO transport ship in the Mediterranean is “completely against the interests of the southern EU countries and also against our own.”
This year Germany has witnessed an influx of migrants on a scale that hasn’t been seen since the great migration crisis of 2015-2016. According to Manuel Ostermann, the deputy chairman of Germany’s Federal Police Union, more than 1,500 illegal migrants are arriving in Germany each day, with September alone witnessing some 40,000 migrants—not including Ukrainian refugees—reach German territory.
An opinion survey released earlier this month revealed that 53% of German citizens have a “very big” worry or “big” worry that “too many people were immigrating to Germany.”
Kubicki also sharply criticized the coalition’s recently announced scheme to increase government handouts, referred to as “citizen money,” and for the first time admitted that the FDP, despite backing the plan in public, actually rejects it.
“We as FDP are currently defending the citizen’s income—although that goes completely against the grain: We eliminate the incentive to go to work full-time if we allow high additional income opportunities with the citizen’s income. Work is no longer worthwhile,” Kubicki said.
Lastly, the FDP’s second-in-command expressed his profound disagreement with the traffic light coalition’s energy policy. The fact that nuclear power plants will not continue to run until mid-2024 is “the biggest toad that we, the FDP, have swallowed,” Kubicki said, adding that “it annoys [him] to death that we suddenly don’t want to produce gas in the North Sea because Climate and Energy Minister Robert Habeck no longer wants it.”
Kubicki’s criticism comes just one day after he called on Christian Linder, the leader of the FDP, to be more assertive and confrontational when dealing with the coalition’s left-liberal, red-green partners. “The fun stops now,” Kubicki said to the Federal Minister of Finance. Since the “SPD and Greens are making demands that are not in the coalition agreement,” he added, “we’re going to do that now.”
