As of: January 24, 2024, 12:58 p.m
By: Amy Walker
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AfD leader Alice Weidel supports a vote on Germany's exit from the EU.
A look at Great Britain shows how devastating the consequences would be.
London/Berlin/Brussels – If AfD leader Alice Weidel wanted to cause a stir with her interview with the
Financial Times
, then at least she succeeded.
In a conversation with British journalists, she spoke out in favor of a referendum on Germany's exit from the EU - a “Dexit”.
In her opinion, such a referendum should only take place if previous attempts to reform the EU according to her party's ideas have failed, Weidel continued.
But the very idea of a “Dexit” is extremely dangerous.
Economists agree that leaving the EU would endanger prosperity.
A look at Great Britain and the consequences of Brexit since 2020 is enough.
Great Britain damaged itself with Brexit
In a referendum in 2016, 52 percent of the British people who took part voted to leave the EU and 48 percent voted to remain.
Great Britain's exit was completed in 2020. “It is a model for Germany that you can make such a sovereign decision,” Weidel is quoted by the
Financial Times
.
The “model for Germany” that Alice Weidel advocates looks like this: According to a current analysis by Bloomberg Economics, the costs of Brexit in Great Britain amount to 100 billion pounds (117 billion euros) per year.
The economists estimated that the gross domestic product (GDP) would be around four percent smaller and that at least 370,000 workers would be lost as a result of Great Britain's exit from the EU, many of them in the health sector.
Calls for EU reform: Alice Weidel.
© Melissa Erichsen/dpa
“Did the UK vote for an act of economic self-destruction in the 2016 referendum?
The evidence currently suggests this,” write the economists in the Bloomberg study.
Trade, prices, investments: the consequences of Brexit are hitting us with full force
And other reports and analyzes repeatedly show how Great Britain has damaged itself with Brexit.
Things turned out to be more complicated than expected in the first two years after Brexit: both the corona pandemic and the energy crisis also left their mark on the British economy.
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But while many comparable countries such as the G7 have been able to get back on their feet, this is not the case for Great Britain.
“We see negative effects in all areas, in prices, in investments, in trade, which we can now attribute to Brexit.
Not on the pandemic, not on the energy crisis – these are clearly consequences of Brexit,” explains business editor Chris Giles in a video from the
Financial Times (FT).
This can be seen particularly impressively in the export figures: While exports collapsed everywhere in the world in 2020 due to the pandemic, British exports have not recovered to pre-crisis levels since then - but they have in comparable countries.
A practical example is provided by businesswoman Kiran Tawdey, who
was interviewed in a short film by the
FT about the consequences of Brexit for her trade: “In reality, between January and June
[2021, note d.
Red]
do not export anything to the EU.
Nothing".
Her company, which sells tea, had previously traded worldwide, but primarily in the EU.
“EU customers no longer come to British stands at international trade fairs,” reports Tawdey.
In the end, she decided to move her business to Europe to reduce bureaucracy and export costs.
Other companies, especially small companies, for which it was not possible to relocate production to the EU had to live with a break in their trade relationship with Europe.
Dexit would be “the economic disaster” for Germany
The economic damage to Great Britain is enormous - but it would be even greater for Germany.
“Our interconnectedness within Europe is so great that a hard Dexit would be very, very expensive.
That would be an economic catastrophe for Germany,” says economist Moritz Schularick from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW) to
Spiegel
.
Marcel Fratzscher from the German Institute for Economic Research also tells the magazine: “Germany is even more dependent on exports and the EU than Great Britain.
Therefore, a Dexit would destroy millions of jobs and would be one of the biggest mistakes you could make.”
In any case, it is considered unlikely that Germany would actually dare to undertake a “Dexit” – a referendum is not likely at all in this country.
In order to hold such a referendum at all, there would have to be a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag.
In Germany, referendums at the federal level are not provided for in the Basic Law, except for the reorganization of federal states.
This would first require a change to the Basic Law.