The task for Germany today is - through its own policies and its own structural reforms, its own investments - to support the EU and the Commission... but every nation has to have the courage to broach such structural reforms and speak clearly about them without making people be afraid.

Besides Germany, the only countries that don't have speed limits are places like Nepal, where road conditions are so bad that a limit would be beside the point. In other words, it's a little crazy that this is even a topic for debate in Germany.

In the business of politics, emotions and productive dissatisfaction with the world in which we live today are gradually being covered up by the minutiae of ordinary life.

Taming the financial markets and winning back democratic control over them is the central condition for creating a new social balance in Germany and Europe.

However, I have a low opinion of people with narrow political horizons. Someone who talks about the environment and knows nothing about economics can make as many mistakes as someone who does the opposite.

Those who reject integration programs in the long term have as little right to stay in Germany as a hate preacher paid from abroad in a mosque.

Climate protection creates sustainability and jobs in the real economy - in construction, in the production of heavy machinery and in systems engineering.