Free, colorful society!
Pegida agitates in Karlsruhe, Stuttgart and Villingen-Schwenningen. The opponents of the educational plan regularly demonstrate their cluelessness in Stuttgart. We are on the brink of a relapse to the Biedermeier.
I will fight to ensure that it won’t come that far. I want children and adolescents of all religions to be taught together and therefore reducing prejudice. I want a social climate at schools where queer kids and adolescents can be themselves.
But the fight against discrimination must not only be fought in schools. I frequently ride the train route between Strasbourg and Offenburg and on almost every trip I observe the police only checking Black and Turkish-/Arab-looking people. I’m convinced that we have to sensitize all policeman in their training.
For a society free from discrimination, the fight against the political right is important. Demonstrations against Nazis must not be criminalized. We should be grateful to people, who courageously demonstrate against Nazis. Besides this commitment we also need a solid financing of consultation for victims of right-wing violence.
Modern society is networked!
A modern society has not only space for everyone, it is also interlinked. The development of broadband networks were improved by the state government. The target is that every household can reach speeds of 50 Mbit/s.
But not only at home must be the network fast. Mobile Internet is more and more important. We have to support free WiFis and free radio initiatives. Also, we need WiFi-Hotspots in public transport.
Conservation of nature meets tourism!
With the Black Forest National Park, we have a marvelous and unique nature conservation project in our region. Not only that: With the many offers for the young and old, the National Park invites you to explore the nature and is therefore also a brilliant educational project.
With Strasbourg, the Europa Park and now the National Park nearby, we now have three large and central tourist attractions in the region. This strengthens the Ortenau as a tourist location and creates and secures jobs, because „National Park“ and „Black Forest“ are internationally known brands.
Mobility is freedom!
We need attractive mobility services, so that people from here and tourists from around the globe can discover our region. This means not only that we need to have a public transport to get people from A to B with short headways, but also by offering car sharing possibilities and also by promoting electromobility. Therefore, we need a dense network of charging stations. With bike rental stations at train stations, we invite people to discover our cities and towns by bike and not jamming them with cars. For this we need well-developed bike paths and bike roads. This could be supplemented with intelligent traffic light systems.
I wish for a statewide student ticket. Until that happens, the TGO should offer a student ticket. On the one hand the Ortenau has also technical colleges with Kehl and Offenburg, and on the other hand, many students commute from the Ortenau to the universities of Karlsruhe and Freiburg.
Mobility is not only important for tourists and students, but for all people. Especially elderly people and disabled persons need public transport. Train stations, bus stops and the buses and trains have to be accessible. This helps all people with reduced mobility: Beside wheelchair users and elderly people with wheeled walkers, those are also parents with buggies. Last, but not least, cyclists will have it easier, too.
Also I wish that public transport becomes free-to-use. It should completely be publicly funded and open for all people – without having to buy a ticket. Such a project should be accompanied by scientific studies, to find out the impact of such a bold move on public transport itself, the environment and the economy. To eventually get there, we should test this concept first, by making the public transport free to use in larger cities on rush hours only. Especially for cities and municipalities suffering with high levels of air pollution, this could be a good approach.
Strengthen fundamental rights!
The police brutality against protesters of Stuttgart 21 in 2010 showed us, that police officers unfortunately are not always the good bobbies. Especially demonstrations with left-wing topics suffer from numerous repressions. To regain the confidence in the state and its public servants, we desperately need a mandatory identification for all police officers. This should be done with anonymized numbers, because even police officers have fundamental rights.
We also need an independent investigations, whenever a police officer commits a crime on duty. This could also be a univeral ombudmanship that’s also responsible for taking complains of police officers.