Annette spoke exclusively to Saxony Minister President Mitchell Kachma and
asked him whether the rise of the Afd represented a
threat to domestic policy making.
Take a listen. Yeah, for ending Denise Almar.
We need to tackle the problems which voters perceive as
having been neglected for many years.
Your colleagues from the news agencies and other media outlets
ask voters on a regular basis what topics are most
important to them.
The dominant topics are migration,
energy policy, state overreach as seen with the recent farmer
protests.
If we don't fill the vacuum in which populists operate,
we will never be successful.
That's a lesson we've learned from right wing parties like
the NPD or the Republicans,
where the extremist wing has grown increasingly vocal in the
last few years.
These phenomena disappeared after the problems got solved.
Right now they're not being solved and that's why we
see people moving into their camp.
We, as the opposition party in parliament,
always offered to solve the problems together with the government,
but that common approach was not favoured.
This as economies across the EU try to counter growing
trade tensions around the world.
Yeah, not Mac via the negative output.
So far we've only felt the beginning of the negative
consequences,
but we still don't have a solution for slow economic
growth and strong competition from the US and China.
The Inflation Reduction Act is a protectionist measure and we
look at it astonished,
but we don't have an answer.
The IPCI or a European project,
but they offer too little and are too bureaucratic and
take too long.
Other measures to build up hydrogen are not fast or
powerful enough to compare with what the US is doing.
And on the other side of China and the discussion
around solar cells,
we shouldn't make the mistake,
for instance, for populist reasons by answering with tariffs and
other protectionist measures.
There are two issues here that are important.
One is our own competitiveness that was also mentioned by
the French President.
Here. We need to talk about energy supply and energy
costs in Germany.
How much will electricity cost in the future?
Is Germany headed in the right direction?
Macron put a big question mark at the end of
these sentences,
and I think he's right.
Secondly, we shouldn't forget that some issues,
for instance what we currently monitor with a Chinese solar
panels,
are directly connected to the closure of the US market.
And we, as Europe with our 450 million people,
need to find our own strong position both towards the
US and also towards China.
We should be a ball between these two powers that
flies from one side to the other.
We need to ask what is our own strength and
how can we enforce it?