CSU legend Peter Gauweiler would also agree to an AfD application if necessary

Mr. Gauweiler, when it comes to your political location, you like to rely on Thomas Mann: If the barge tilts right, I sit down to the left – and vice versa. Where are you right now?
Peter Gauweiler: Currently on the safe dry. In the grandstand, from where you always know everything better.

Hasn’t the political discourse in Germany shifted clearly to the right?
Gauweiler: What does « postponed » mean? Rights and left -wing movements cause each other and live in the middle. The simplicity of this connection is almost frightening. The associated disruption of public life cannot be solved by political police, but only with arguments, presented in a plenary accessible by election decision. That is the idea of ​​parliamentary democracy. Parlare – talking and listening to the opposite opinion. A ban would only prove that the author of the ban itself no longer believes in the effectiveness of their arguments.

So also with the AfD talk?
Gauweiler: Nobody gets out of his head prison by isolating, over -shouting or shouting or making public pillors, and the climax of worldwide « moral bombing ». For years, the United States said about Ho Chí Minh: This is a communist to Moscow, we don’t talk to him. Today, a ban on speech and contact is required for everything and everyone that is considered undemocratic right and authoritarian. The same spit, only the other way around. This is not argumentative. Only very unsurely.

What do you suggest?
Gauweiler: President Trump was absolutely right that and how he gave Syria’s new head of state-an Islamic ex-revolutionary-an opportunity and took him as he is. If you are not successful with a political strategy, such as Bush Junior, Obama and Biden in the Middle East, then you have to try the opposite. Don’t look away and squeeze the lips together. It is not much different in terms of domestic policy. Everyone knows anyway: Germany and the German success model can only work from the middle. Nevertheless, you shouldn’t have blinkers. I was once heavily criticized in the Bundestag because I had voted in favor of an application from the left. How could you? The application was completely correct and went against the privatization of the water supply. If the application had come from the right, I would not have had a problem either.

Doesn’t sound like a tough demarcation.
Gauweiler: Politics is problem solving, not demarcation. I don’t believe in the elimination of different people through a strategy of defamed negative groups. The Union gave the reliable problem solving their attraction. It is the middle of the middle and it must show it in the future.

Friedrich Merz Has announced that from now on there is no more policy for « left -wing spinners ». Do you like that?
Gauweiler: A bit worn. Friedrich Merz takes me in because and how he gotten up again and again after the years of deflection maneuvers against his person. That he was professionally successful for decades. You can see what the man is good for this. And the « bureaucratic » in this type can also mean something very professional.

At the same time, the haze of open bills that he still wanted to pay over always hovers over his career. For example with Angela Merkel.
Gauweiler: Angela Merkel put it nicely. She meant the same way: we were actually like classmates, with the same goal. Unfortunately, it was the same office that only existed once. That’s life. One should pay bills; The mental bills can also be left open.

Do you also have any?
Gauweiler: Who doesn’t have that? Fortunately, with me, they are becoming more and more too waste paper.

In his own ranks, Merz resent some people that after the election he did exactly the opposite of what he had promised before. Keyword: new debts. Would you have played as a member of the member?
Gauweiler: One of my many disadvantages as a politician was that I was too immobile for such lightning -fast twists.

How do you actually like the word « special fund »?
Gauweiler: Not at all. The political Berlin is not liked because of word art of this kind. Terms are fabricated that should convey the opposite of what the actual plan is. Manipulation through language. « Look on the (naked) emperor new clothes! » I don’t do that.

Part of the special fund is said to flow into defense in order to prepare themselves against the threat of Russia. You see that critically. Isn’t it essential to be able to defend yourself?
Gauweiler: Read after big statesmen! Strauß, Adenauer, Churchill, Kissinger said at the end of their lives: wars can no longer be manageable in the nuclear age, no longer profit – all wars slip over control. I once presented Strauß a program for shelters, in subway stations, Tunnels et cetera. Then he only said: « Peter Gauweiler, even before they will have gone up from their desk, they were atomic in the event of a nuclear attack. » And the big goal of the Federal Republic should now be serious, against the largest nuclear power in the world to become « ready to war » with a conventional army? Only the potential enemies should wait a few more years. Does anyone start to deter this or is it not more foolish to the intolerance?

Only: would that be Ukraine Not going lost without a conventional army long ago? Merz said in his government statement that Germany should be able to defend himself so that it does not have to defend itself. The Chancellor Schmidt and Kohl also explained the ultimately successful NATO double decision in the 1980s.
Gauweiler: The NATO double decision was the opposite. Maintaining balance without a shot. And not stabilizing a hot position war in the Russian-Ukrainian border dispute. For months or years. To conquer a few villages for a myriad of dead. It’s about something completely different.

Namely?
Gauweiler: Due to Mikhail Gorbachev’s great act and the end of the Cold War, Europe got a new chance in the early 1990s and we didn’t use it as we could have done. At that time we dreamed of overcoming the large ditch, connecting Berlin and Moscow to the Transrapid and Munich with the Black Sea. Instead, they dealt with waste separation, spelling reform and red socks campaigns. And foreign policy with morally justified bombing in ex-Yugoslavia. It was wrong how the West let their peoples and himself let themselves be hanged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it was also wrong that NATO also interfered militarily all over the world.

This is how Vladimir Putin argues. But do we agree that it was he who unleashed this war with the attack on Ukraine? At the side of Sahra Wagenknecht for peace talks with Moscow. Do you really think you can negotiate with this man?
Gauweiler: An opponent who cannot be beaten is cleverly put into conversation. Angela Merkel did that. If we make someone down as a monster consistently, we also exclude any possibility of his rehabilitation. Playing judges everywhere doesn’t help. Do you want to say that it was a mistake by Pope John Paul II to talk to Fidel Castro back then? Or after the Kissinger cultural revolution with Mao? Or to negotiate the transition to the reconciliation commission with the Apartheid regime from South Africa? At that time, Desmond Tutu expressly rejected a South African “Nuremberg Court of Justice”.

The first weeks of the new Chancellor are shaped by foreign policy. The largest construction sites will be economy and migration. Do you have more hope?
Gauweiler: I think Merz and Söder Have made the right man the interior minister. Alexander Dobrindt is a hard nut. And he also created facts on the first day, in almost Trumpscher Manner. Dobrindt is a convinced European, but of course he is absolutely right that no EU member has a legal right to force the entry from third parties to Germany.

The migration question will also be yours CSU be measured. In the Bundestag election, she did not achieve her own goals. Horst Seehofer says it is to Markus Söder.
Gauweiler: (laughs) The old and new prime minister have a natural dup and a special kind of love relationship with each other. Both have got better under control of the centrifugal forces of our society than the CDU.

Söder is repeatedly accused of being more entertaining artists than politicians. Does that bother you?
Gauweiler: Söder is not an idle personvery lifelong and stands on a fixed foundation. Certainly an exceptional politician, whom I also trust. He just shouldn’t repeat the mistake of former sovereigns to be hypnotized by all Federal Republican. Obviously, Franz Josef Strauß was not entirely free from such over -fixations. Our Bavaria is different and has its own place in the world.

To the person, for the interview: Anyone who visits Peter Gauweiler in his Munich law firm usually takes a seat on a really large black leather armchair. « For clients and visitors, » says the 75-year-old and faces himself. Pages of the CSU veteran with celebrities from all over the world, framed behind him. A cup of filter coffee in front of him. Gauweiler, once notorious as a « black Peter », sees himself in the tradition of Franz Josef Strauß. But the former member of the Bundestag was always a cross -border commuter between left and right. He made a name for himself as a conservative hardliner, but is also friends with Oskar Lafontaine and invited the last GDR boss Egon Krenz to his 70th birthday. His « idol » in the Bible is the « sinful Zöllner Zacheus, » he says. A person with his weaknesses.