We must now, in the 21st century, protect democracy, one which rests on fundamental rights for all, regardless of skin color, gender, race or religion. Nothing less than that is at stake.

In 2003, Helmut Schmidt said: Predatory capitalism exists, we have to civilize it and we can do that via Europe. He was right. We haven't tried hard enough.

We're at a historical juncture: A growing number of people are declaring what has been achieved over the past decades in Europe to be wrong. They want to return to the nation-state. Sometimes there is even a blood and soil rhetoric that for me is starkly reminiscent of the interwar years of the past century, whose demons we are still all too familiar with.

It is courageous to occasionally admit that there are certain things one can't do.

I would never attack somebody only because they belong to a different party.

Now Europe are experiencing a wave of eroding solidarity, first of certain societies and then entire governments. At the same time, we have two giant new challenges to meet: the migration movement and terror. And then Great Britain is thinking about leaving the EU. That should suffice as a description.

I am strictly against making cuts in the current budgetary period for things such as research funding and investments as a reaction to Brexit. I think that we can do an excellent job of explaining this to the German people.