In all of my encounters with voters, I have repeatedly been confronted with two points of critique. First: You politicians are all the same! Second: You politicians may be speaking German, but we still don't understand you!

We all have to accept accusations that we ignored the refugee crisis for far too long. The first time that I referred to the Mediterranean Sea as Europe's cemetery was in October 2013, when hundreds of people drowned off Lampedusa. Italians, Maltese, Greeks and Spaniards have been pleading for help for years. But nobody cared.

It was a Russian airplane that was bombed over the Sinai Peninsula. When the Russians conduct air strikes on IS, they are doing so because they too are threatened by terror.

Referendums are a democratic instrument, but so are decisions reached in a parliamentary democracy. I advise extreme caution when it comes to referendums. In Germany too.

Germany is not a fair country. Millions of people believe that things aren't fair in this country. Company profits and bonus payments have increased at the same rate as precarious employment situations.

There you see how absurd the reactions of the so-called markets are. For a long time, Italy was run by one of the most unprofessional politicians anywhere. But there wasn't much pressure in terms of speculation. Now, in Mario Monti, Italy has the kind of leader you usually only get in Hollywood movies, a distinguished professor who won't even accept a cook at his residence, the Palazzo Chigi. Instead Monti's wife cooks their pasta herself - and this is the man the markets don't trust.

Politics is a dynamic process. When I was a young man in the 1970s, Yasser Arafat had just perpetrated various terrorist attacks. Just a few years later, after I had entered European Parliament, the same Yasser Arafat was given the Nobel Peace Prize.