When the Bundestag discussed a tightening of the Infection Protection Act on December 10th, including compulsory vaccination for health care workers, the health policy spokeswoman for the FDP Christine Aschenberg-Dugnus found a reason that makes people sit up and take notice.
She said that the law's "overall balance of freedom" had positive effects.
Rainer Hank
Freelance writer in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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What does she mean by the “total freedom balance”?
Obviously, the freedoms of a group (the elderly or the sick and their relatives) are added, and the compulsory vaccination for doctors, nurses and carers is then subtracted from this.
If, on balance, more freedoms are protected than coercive measures are prescribed, the “overall freedom balance” is obviously positive.
The trick is to suppress the compulsory vaccination and to market the legal measure as a whole as an expression of a freedom decision.
If the freedom of ten people is bought with the lack of freedom of five people, then that may be necessary or even proportionate, I don't want to judge that at all here.
But it remains a compulsive act that restricts the freedom of the minority.
Freedom cannot be netted
I am worried that the party, which has written freedom in its name and its program, is fooling people and believes they don't notice.
To avoid misunderstandings, it is very difficult for me to understand why people do not get vaccinated.
I think vaccination protects me and others from corona.
But this is how it is with the freedom of others: It must be respected as freedom when I do not share or approve of the action and the attitude on which it is based.
When, if not here, is Rosa Luxemburg's overused dictum justified: "Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently." Freedom cannot be balanced out in an overall balance sheet.
How could something like this happen to the Free Democrats?
It's easy to explain.
As is well known, in the traffic light negotiations the FDP campaigned for a “Freedom Day”, with which the “pandemic situation of national scope” should come to an end.
Stupidly, that happened at the time when the incidence numbers shot up again exponentially.
The traffic light was forced to row back, with which the FDP in turn negotiated the malicious accusation that you could see what their ideology of freedom was doing: it endangered human lives.
As a defensive reaction, the Free Democrats are now doing everything in their power to interpret their turnaround as an expression of freedom.
"Freedom is freedom"
If the FDP dilutes the concept of freedom to such an extent that it even subsumes its opposite, it betrays the value of freedom in itself. All you have to do is look at the interviews that party chairman and finance minister Christian Lindner recently gave. In the FAZ at the beginning of December, Lindner spoke of the “state community of responsibility” that must now react flexibly. This shows an authoritarian understanding of the state and community that a liberal should not be able to find. In a conversation with the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” a few days earlier, he named the idea of “responsibility-bound freedom” as the top priority of his party, which is nothing more than a denial of freedom. Who allows themselves to “bind” freedom? Who defines what responsibility is.The government? Parliament? The general at the head of the new council of experts?