CSV parliamentary faction leader Martine Hansen was scathing of prime minister Xavier Bettel’s state of the nation speech, saying “we learned nothing new” Matic Zorman

CSV parliamentary faction leader Martine Hansen was scathing of prime minister Xavier Bettel’s state of the nation speech, saying “we learned nothing new” Matic Zorman

A speech devoid of real content that failed to focus on, or even touch upon, some of the most pressing issues facing the grand duchy. That is how opposition party members of parliament summed up DP prime minister Xavier Bettel’s state of the nation address on Tuesday afternoon.

In a series of interviews with our sister publication Paperjam, the likes of Sven Clement from the Pirate Party and Martine Hansen, leader of the main opposition CSV faction, took umbrage with Bettel’s failure to provide concrete policy plans. Clement said it was important to talk about climate--one of the three main subjects tackled by Bettel--but said that “there was a lack of vision on how to solve the problems he mentioned”. In addition, Clement said that his party “strongly deplored” Bettel’s failure to talk about social cohesion, education and housing.

The lack of any real content on climate change was also cited by Hansen, who said she was “truly disappointed” by the speech “because we learned nothing new, really nothing.”  She said the prime minister had done little more than undertake a diagnosis of the climate problem “without announcing a single concrete measure” on how to react against climate change.

ADR MP Roy Reding said that what most concerned him was the government’s apparent desire to manage the way people lived through taxation. “That really frightens me,” he told Paperjam. Déi Lénk’s Marc Baum also cited the lack of real policy pronouncements on climate change as a key disappointment in what he called a “frustrating” speech, but he also lamented the failure to address the most important problems of the country, in his view “social inequality, growth and housing”.