Ralph Schoellhammer
speaker
70 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Ralph Schoellhammer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thank you so much for having me.
Well, it's a good question. Let me put it this way. It depends whether or not Germany will find back to sanity in the near future. I mean, overall, I think your viewers probably see it the same way. Overall, it's better for the world if Europe and the United States cooperate and have good relations. But I understand that Donald Trump is upset.
I mean, he probably is not forgetting that, you know, the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, sent 100 labor people to the U.S. to campaign for For Kamala Harris, he will not have forgotten that the German president called him a hate preacher.
He will not have forgotten that basically the entire European Commission said don't vote for Trump, so that there are some hurt feelings for good reasons, I understand. But on the long run, I still hope that these are quarrels among siblings, that as a broader Western civilization, we are still on the same side.
Well, you know, platitudes are easy. Action is actually much more difficult. And just a reminder for your viewers who are probably not so familiar with French politics. A couple of years ago, Emmanuel Macron tried to increase the retirement age by two years. I think it was from 61 to 63 or something thereabouts. And the streets were aflame.
So the idea that you can then raise the French people to take cuts to the welfare state in the name of defense spending, that is simply not going to work. By the way, that's not going to work anywhere in Europe. And this is not just that the Europeans got used to their social systems.
I always afraid to tell this to your American viewers, but just to give you a feeling of what we are talking about. I think the average American takes 14 vacation days. The average European takes 24 vacation days. That is not including public holidays, which are in Austria an additional 13. And now comes the greatest of all things. We don't get 12 yearly salaries. We get 14 yearly salaries by law.
So I always make fun when, you know, some of my European friends say, Europe is a vassal of the United States. We're a colony of the United States. I'm telling you, if that is true, it was very comfortable to be a colony of the United States because you guys did all the working and we took all the vacation days. So that was very nice. And I think that Donald Trump wants to put a name to it.
But on a more serious note, what is a bigger problem? And I'm sure that we're going to talk about this also in greater detail. There is a sense in Western Europe that especially due to mass migration, and this is, of course, was also correct, that security, a sense of safety, crime rates have gone up, a sense of safety has gone down.
So the sense is, if we cannot protect our own borders, if we cannot protect life in our own cities, why are we supposed to protect the borders of Ukraine and the security of Ukrainians? Again, I'm not against it, but of course, it makes complete sense that most people say, shouldn't the government primarily take care of its own people before they take care of people somewhere else?
And I think that is an understandable reaction.
Well, the pushback is something we've seen, and I'm sure that many of you have followed. Why did more and more people shift their votes to, not everywhere, Denmark is a small country, it's an exception, but in some of the major countries, they shift their votes to the right. We saw it in France, we saw it in Germany, we saw it particularly in Austria.
The case in the United Kingdom is a little bit different. I think that Mr. Marshall, who is your next guest, can talk about this in greater detail, because I would argue that there is also a desire for more conservative politics, but people were so upset
with the Conservative Party that did not govern in a conservative way, that then they gave the votes to Labour, or that many Conservatives stayed at home and the votes of Labour ultimately then caused the shift that happened. But people want change.
And the big issue we see, that's the same, to make this more interesting for your American audience, what we see in Germany, in France, in the UK, in the United States, is people want change. But the entrenched elites, for understandable reasons, don't want change. So if they can no longer win at the voting booth, they have to find other ways.
So what we see, for example, in Germany, I think we're going to talk about this, is that they weaponize NGOs. In France, they're going to use the legal system. In the UK, it's very often now the states that clamps down. In the United States, it's the media. And what we saw, I don't know how many people followed this, but we currently had a presidential election in Romania annulled.
And the leading candidate, who is with 44 percent leading in the polls, has now been banned from running because he's supposedly too far to the right. And these are all kind of steps where an existing governing elite tries to cling to power and prevent anybody who could challenge them from actually coming to power.
Oh, it already is. I mean, one of the things, and I have full disclosure to my viewers, I'm very sympathetic to Donald Trump. And one of the reasons is because of what the things that people tend to complain about. He is a bulldozer. He is indeed the proverbial elephant in the China shop.
And he has done one thing that nobody dared over the last couple of decades, which is let's take a look at all these NGOs. And I give you one example.
One of the major NGOs in Germany that has introduced all these observatory institutions that collect information on whether people say something anti-feminist or racist or something we also talked before the show, right, Eva, do you have a relative that might have fallen victim to conspiracy theories? Now, if you take a closer look at the main NGO behind this,
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