In “Hart aber fair” a spokeswoman for the “Last Generation” fabulates about a “social council” whose measures would actually be implemented. Under the cloak of climate protection, a kind of eco-socialism was propagated here. That is anti-democratic and misplaced.
It is the mega topic of our time: the climate crisis. To meet this challenge, you need as many as possible. It is all the more important to take people with us in the fight to keep the earth worth living on. However, this can only be done with fidelity to the facts and a proper sense of justice. It is all the more astonishing when a speaker from the “last generation” shows off her anti-democratic understanding of the law live on television in front of an audience of millions and attracts negative attention due to her ignorance.
On Monday evening, Aimée van Baalen was a guest on the ARD talk show “Hart aber fair” with moderator Louis Klamroth. It was about the climate. The 23-year-old is not only a spokeswoman for the “Last Generation”, but also a member of “Fridays for Future” and “Extinction Rebellion”, i.e. an activist by profession – salary included.
For example, when young and older people are glued to the Stachus in Munich, she stands by and eloquently explains that the government is deliberately and knowingly violating the Basic Law, referring to Article 20a. Almost 30 years ago, environmental and climate protection was included in the constitution as a national goal. A direct legal claim cannot be derived from this. In this respect, it is a somewhat daring legal maneuver to accuse the traffic light of violating the constitution.
Anyone who asserts must prove. The “last generation” has so far failed to provide proof. Instead, van Baalen explains in the ARD that the 9-euro ticket permanently required by your organization “does not cost anything”. Is 2.5 billion euros nothing? That’s how much the federal government spent last year on the 9-euro ticket in June, July and August alone.
Much more dramatic than such gaps in knowledge is the legal understanding that the spokeswoman for an entire “last generation” revealed to Louis Klamroth. She blustered about “other democratic means” and a “social council” to be installed. In this, people would be drawn who would decide in “crisis meetings” “which measures will then actually be implemented”.
I beg your pardon? Arbitrarily drawn by lot, citizens should in future tell an entire society where to go? You can’t show more openly that you don’t cling to the Basic Law with both hands, to which the “last generation” otherwise refers so overzealously, but trample on the constitution – apparently preferably in the bin. The demand here is nothing less than the abolition of parliamentary democracy.
The deputy leader of the FDP parliamentary group in the Bundestag, the 33-year-old lawyer Konstantin Kuhle, summed it up straight away when he said “Hard but fair”: “That opens the floodgates to the arbitrary state”. One can only hope that van Baalen and her comrades-in-arms listened carefully to Kuhle’s tutoring on democracy at the end of the show.
“The decisions in Germany are made by the German Bundestag because it is democratically legitimized by elections by the entire population,” says Kuhle. “You can’t draw people by random and endow them with the power to decide the weal and woe of the whole country. That is undemocratic.”
The “last generation” uses the important issue of climate to attack the free-democratic basic order and to propagate a kind of eco-socialism. This is actually a case for the protection of the constitution, but it is certainly actionism that is drifting in the completely wrong direction. Public broadcasters should pay more attention to who they bring into the studio. Anti-democrats – regardless of whether they are from the right or the left – should not be allowed to separate their vague theses there.
