Listening to the debates in our country over the last few weeks, I sometimes had the title of a book by Joachim Meyerhoff in mind: “Wann wird es endlich wieder so, wie es nie war”, or when will it finally be like it never was.

Back in the day, security supposedly cost nothing, wars were supposedly far away and only the Greens were interested in the climate – that was this supposedly ideal past.

To be honest, I can totally understand this longing for the supposedly ideal world of the past, especially on days when you could be forgiven for thinking that the whole world has come apart at the seams. It’s a profoundly human phenomenon.

But we’re not living in a world where we can have everything, where everything is smiles and sunshine, but in a reality that we didn’t choose. That’s our political responsibility today.

But it’s also true that this supposedly secure, better past never existed. Our security in Germany, and even more so in Europe, has never been a given. Supposedly cheap gas from Russia came at the expense of our energy sovereignty, our energy security.

Our life in a free and peaceful Europe, which many of my generation have always taken for granted, was built by courageous people, especially in the east of our country and, above all, in the east of our continent. It now falls to us, to our generation, to preserve our peace and our freedom, to preserve what protects us, by bringing about the change that’s needed in this world in which we live today.

And we can only do this together, regardless of whether we’re talking about our national security, about the protection of our European peaceful order and freedom in the European Union or about migration. We will not succeed by going it alone – and it’s a miracle of the past that we Germans in particular are no longer alone.

That’s why, after ten years of negotiations, we have finally reached agreement together in the EU on a difficult but much-needed compromise on the Common European Asylum System. We will only manage this together, after all. We shouldn’t forget this, and we held this debate this morning. I also say this to our eastern European neighbours and partners.

We will continue to move forward together as Europeans and preserve what protects us, namely our European freedom, which is founded on Schengen and our freedom of movement.

At the same time, we’re doing everything that is necessary to protect our external borders. Shouldering together the burden that we necessarily bear in these times in which we as democracies are under attack from without and from within. We must do this with humanity and with orderly procedures. This dual approach has always guided us: to ensure order as states governed by the rule of law and to know that we stand on the foundations of the EU as a union of shared values.

We are all unfortunately aware of the fact that you from the AfD are not familiar with this union of shared values and that you want to abolish it. It’s precisely this threat that we’re facing.

We stand up for this union of shared values because protecting our democracy and the rule of law, protecting our values, is the best guarantee of our security.

This also guides us in our foreign policy. This guides us in a policy where we can make lofty speeches, in which we can generate quick headlines, but where there’s suffering each and every day, where we have to decide each and every day how to act. This is not about how we would like to act, but about how we create change in the here and now.

In reality. A reality in which women and children in villages in eastern Ukraine gather in evacuation buses early in the morning to flee the approaching Russian troops – that’s what this world is about.

A reality in which observation drones are sighted over Bundeswehr bases, at the heart of Germany, drones that some people simply claim not to see.

In reality, conflicts, wars and the climate crisis aren’t distant things that we can turn a blind eye to. They have an impact on us and on our security. It’s therefore important for us to take a close look at what’s going on in the world, and even more so on our doorstep.

The humanitarian disaster in the Sudan affects us directly here, too, just like instability in the Sahel region. Our security is at stake there.

We need international engagement in order to protect our prosperity and security, especially here at home.

We need a robust budget, a security budget, to this end.

Does the budget we’re discussing here provide absolutely everything we need for this? To be honest, no. We need far more than this for our security, for security at home and abroad.

But we’re conducting policy in the real world, one in which we cannot modernise the check on public borrowing by closing our eyes and wishing it were so. In our parliamentary democracy, in our reality, this requires a two-thirds majority, which we unfortunately don’t have.

We have mustered the strength to change reality in the here and now with the special fund.

We have acknowledged the security situation together. I’d therefore like to emphasise the following: not only I, as Foreign Minister, but also the Defence Minister and the Interior Minister, are all prepared to work with you as the CDU/CSU to get this security budget off the ground in the same way as the special fund.

As long as this isn’t possible, the government, fortunately, cannot create this two-thirds majority itself in a state governed by the rule of law. That’s why we have set painful but clear priorities in this budget, including in my departmental budget, at every ministry, including our own. We have asked ourselves what is indispensable for securing our peace and our freedom.

This includes humanitarian assistance around the world just as much as the enabling and enhancing budget with which we’re supporting Ukraine. It also includes a bilateral commitment to our European neighbourhood. And it also includes doing our utmost each and every day to restore peace in Europe and Ukraine at long last.

Unfortunately, however, we don’t have a magic wand that we can wave to cast a spell on Putin all of a sudden to make him come to the negotiating table. The Federal Chancellor has been very candid about this: the offer from all of us to talk about peace has been there for two and a half years. President Zelensky has reiterated this. Russia’s President responded by attacking a children’s hospital.

Precisely because we’re working each and every day for Ukraine, for peace on our continent, then this much is also true: we will continue to support Ukraine – the budget reflects this – so that not only Ukraine can live in peace, but also so that peace on our continent is secured for our children’s generation.