With warnings of a CSU sole government, attacks on the traffic lights and tailwind for the state chairman Hubert Aiwanger, the Free Voters have started the last five months before the state election. Aiwanger was confirmed in office at the weekend with 95 percent of the vote. He received 112 of 118 valid votes at a state assembly in Amberg on Saturday. There were six votes against.
In his speech, Aiwanger warned of a possible return to a CSU sole government and described the Free Voters as the real driving force in the current coalition. "The CSU must not govern alone. It's good for Bayern if we have a four-eyes principle."
"Without us, Bavaria would be governed worse today than with us, and that's why we have to be back from the fall," he said. "We are the improver of Bavarian state politics." The Free Voters tried to "bring peace and stability to this country."
Criticism of the traffic light energy policy
The only concern that the Free Voters have to have at the moment is that the CSU could end up winning an absolute majority of seats in the state parliament. If this does not happen, a continuation of the coalition that has been in office since 2018 is a foregone conclusion. In polls, the Free Voters are currently at ten percent. In the state election five years ago, they received 11.6 percent of the vote.
In his speech, Aiwanger drew in particular to the verbal all-out attack on the federal government and the traffic light parties. "The traffic lights have to go, the sooner the better, by 2025 at the latest." Aiwanger said he did not believe that a country could be "ruled down" in such a way in two years. "Germany is now suffering from an ideological whiplash injury of red-green-yellow," said Aiwanger. In particular, he criticized the entire energy policy of the Federal Government.
Aiwanger sees heat pump fiasco
Aiwanger went so far as to accuse the Greens of calculating in order to drive frustrated citizens to the AfD with their policies. "I believe that there is a certain calculation involved in provoking the well-behaved bourgeois voter, who has voted for the centrist parties in the past, in such a way that he ends up voting for the AfD out of frustration. Then they will have achieved what they want: because the stronger the AfD is, the more secure the Greens will be in government."
Katharina Schulze, the leader of the Bavarian Green Party parliamentary group, countered: "What Hubert Aiwanger is saying is just ridiculous. He constantly ignites with his statements against queer people, people who care about nature and think fundamentally differently than himself. And now he's coming around the corner with crazy myths, what nonsense." The people of Bavaria deserve not only a better government, but also a new style of government.
Aiwanger also accused the Greens of not being able to guarantee that there would be enough electricity for the many new heat pumps in 2030 and painted a scenario on the wall: "Then remote controls will be installed in the heat pumps, where you can read the temperature from a distance. And I'll tell you one thing: Then an ideological council in Berlin will turn down the heating in Munich, remotely controlled from Berlin. We don't have far to go. Councils will be formed, and these citizens' assemblies will then be allowed to handle a limited amount of energy and then determine how warm it is in your home."
Three years ago, such a thing would have been described as a fantasy from a badly dreamed night. But today, the traffic light is steering the country "really ideologically to the wall".
He wished the FDP to be thrown out of parliament in the state elections on 8 October. "The FDP has betrayed us," he said, adding that the FDP was the biggest disappointment in the federal government and was going along with "every crap" of red-green. "And that's why the FDP has no place in this Bavarian state parliament," he shouted into the hall. "The FDP has to get out of the Bavarian state parliament - they just stand in the way." In any case, the Free Voters are "the better option".