Belong purportedly to certain groups say, "We are the people and not the others." That is something that we cannot allow to happen. That is something that I think at the time in the GDR - at the time when we had this in the GDR, where the people stood in the street and said, "We are the people," that is something that filled me with great joy.

Budget consolidation and economic growth are two sides of the same coin.

Trying to keep a society together, trying to keep the older and the younger people together, trying to keep those who live in rural areas together with those who live in cities is one of the most important and most noble tasks of politicians these days.

We have very stable mechanisms of conflict resolution in terms of labor relations, we have a very good transportation infrastructure, we provide our children with an excellent education and the gap between rich and poor in Germany is relatively narrow. On the other hand, we have trouble accepting change.

We cannot allow employers in Germany to pay hourly wages of 50 cents and shift the remainder of the burden to the taxpayer. After all, we want to create jobs, not open a self-service shop for resourceful employers.

As the head of the government, it is my responsibility to make the overriding political goals and relationships more clear. Part of the reason the public didn't understand some of the reforms enacted during the past legislative period was that there was far too much talk about the details, while the general picture often remained invisible.

Look at the history of the printing press, when this was invented what sort of consequences this had. Or industrialization, what sort of consequences that had. Very often, it led to enormous transformational processes within individual societies. And it took awhile until societies learned how to find the right kind of policies to contain this and manage and steer this.