Boris Palmer describes the dramatic situation in his community to Markus Lanz. Tübingen‘s mayor is launching a sweeping attack on federal politics – and making demands.
Boris Palmer is not a quiet man. After the politician left the Green Party and took a break last year as a result of some controversial statements, Tübingen’s mayor is now back on the political stage – and on the media stage. He sat with Markus Lanz on the ZDF talk show on Tuesday evening and spoke, among other things, about the plight of public budgets.
Palmer said there was an explosion in costs in municipal budgets, among other things due to “expenses for refugees”. The Tübingen budget is currently missing 40 million euros. “When I look at the city budget, all I see at the moment is a huge hole,” said the 52-year-old. In response to moderator Markus Lanz’s objection that Tübingen was a prosperous city, Palmer said: “We used to be, until two years ago – from a case of prosperity to a case of restructuring.”
He then illustrated how dramatic the situation in his community is. In order to close the hole, which accounts for around 15 percent of the total budget, it would be necessary, for example, to “double the property tax for everyone, cancel every second bus trip, close a theater and an indoor swimming pool.”
This means that public services are slowly being depleted and that municipalities can no longer adequately meet. “You can roughly imagine what would happen to the population,” says Palmer.
The non-party politician called on the federal government to finally address the problem. Above all, according to Palmer, Chancellor Olaf Scholz should finally live up to his leadership responsibility on this issue “and then get rid of things that we can no longer afford. Retirement at 63 is completely unaffordable. Maybe we need a little more more weekly working hours.” He criticized the high labor costs combined with dwindling productivity, and said it was absurd that Germany had the lowest number of annual working hours in the world. That’s why a “jolt in Germany” is needed.
Palmer praised the reforms of the Gerhard Schröder era. Its Agenda 2010 ensured a significant reduction in non-wage labor costs, but at the same time also pushed many employees into permanent marginal employment. The ex-Green Palmer would also like something similar from Scholz. “Then maybe he will be re-elected,” said the 52-year-old on “Lanz”.
Tübingen’s mayor also criticized the migration policy of the traffic light government, namely the SPD. After the knife murders in Solingen and Mannheim, they announced a tougher approach to immigration, but are now moving away from the negotiated tightening of the law. That was just “difficult to understand” for him. Especially since a certain pattern emerges in the crime statistics that focuses on a specific group of perpetrators, namely “male asylum seekers traveling alone somewhere between Afghanistan and the Maghreb.”
Never at a loss for exaggeration, Palmer continued: “We know that they have often committed crimes, but they are not stopped and at some point the knife comes and people are dead.”