What Laurence spoke about.

Madam President, Madam Executive Vice-President, ladies and gentlemen, we have had a great deal of discussion about upskilling in Europe and the need for a skilled workforce. Let's talk today about those we forget too often: apprentices and students in vocational training. These sectors are too often underestimated. Yet they lead to employment. They transmit know-how. They contribute to our Europe

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, Paris, Bordeaux, Milan, Bologna, Liège and Brussels: we have all been victims of unprecedented scenes of urban violence. While in France thousands of citizens wanted to exercise their constitutional right to protest, we deplore hundreds of wounded, countless businesses that have been looted, ransacked, the work of a lifetime reduced to nothing. Symbols of the

Mr President, Madam Vice-President, thank you for these proposals to facilitate the mobility of workers in Europe. This mobility is a fundamental freedom of the European Union and perhaps the least developed. So, thank you. It is a solution both to meet the needs of sectors in tension throughout Europe, it is also an offer that opens up to young people to live new life experiences, more simply. I

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the Cultural Compass is a beautiful statement and we thank you for it. Culture, as you said, is our common good. It is the basis of freedom of expression that is also the basis of our democracy. However, this cultural policy in Europe is today a course without means, since culture remains the lowest budget of the European Union. However, our cultur

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the reintegration of Russian athletes under the Russian flag at the last Paralympic Games in Milan-Cortina is particularly serious and worrying. What happened to the International Paralympic Committee and the Italian government to give in to Russian pressure? That really calls for answers. We cannot accept Russia's return to sports competitions

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, at a time of major geopolitical upheaval, European sovereignty is a necessity and education is key to a competitive, free and democratic Europe. Thanks to the objectives of the European Education Area, the results are as follows: between 2002 and 2024, early school leaving rose from 17% to 9% and never before have so many young Europeans graduat

Mr President, Commissioner, we are urgently calling for a legislative proposal to finally effectively counter the piracy of sporting events and other online content. Piracy is unfortunately on the rise. The Paris 2024 Olympics were indeed victims of five times more cases of piracy than the Tokyo Olympics, only three years earlier. Any piracy is a shortfall for our cultural and creative industries,

Mr President, Commissioner, the situation in Lithuania is alarming and – as we can see – very inflamed. Under the guise of revising the budget and amending the statutes, the coalition government between the Social Democrats and a far-right party is attacking public broadcasting and its director head-on. This is all the more serious as it is a retaliatory measure against journalists who have done i

Madam President, Madam High Representative, the subject of trade agreements is debated when it comes to bad agreements. But at a time of instability and geostrategic recompositions, the European Union needs to open up to new regions of the world. India is a partner of choice. It is a democracy, it is a demographic force, a geostrategic power on the Indo-Pacific axis, it is a technological champion

Madam President, Mr President of the Republic, ladies and gentlemen, the Cyprus presidency is opening in a context of major international turbulence. We're counting on you. In the face of Russia, in the face of China and now in the face of the United States, it is time for Europe to fully assume its power. We have the means to do so, but we still have to have the political will to do so. In the fa

Mr President, Madam Vice-President, ladies and gentlemen, Europe is the first political space to have created a rule of law on the internet. The first, with a regulation on the protection of our personal data, the GDPR; with the DSA and the DMA to give particular responsibility to the very large US and Chinese operators; with the act on artificial intelligence. Today, these rules would be too comp

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, Donald Trump has an obsession, attacking our European laws to destabilise us. After the offensives on the climate, trade, defense, industry or even our agriculture, Donald Trump persists and signs and now calls into question our cultural model. Last February, the Trump administration, well helped by the "majors" of film and video-on-demand, rele

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, let us imagine a football match between two Spanish teams taking place in the United States. Does that sound absurd to you? Yet this is the project of the Liga Spanish, and this is one of the last examples of attempts to weaken our European sports model to Americanize it. These attempts are the exact opposite of the model that must be respectful of

Mr President, I am deeply convinced of the strength of these European university alliances and I am delighted to see that we broadly share this view in Parliament. These alliances represent first of all an intellectual asset, because discovering new ways of thinking, exchanging ideas, developing innovative curricula, bringing together professors and researchers, all this beyond national borders, i

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, Europe has already been built up by intellectual and academic exchanges for more than 1,000 years, from the founding of the University of Bologna in 1088, to Erasmus' travels in the 16th century and the Grand Tour, the educational journey through Europe undertaken by young men between the 17th and 19th centuries. It is in the continuity of this ric

Mr President, Minister, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, on 8 August the Media Freedom Regulation will come into force. This law, the first to provide a clear framework for the structuring of the European press and for the protection of journalists, is now a pillar of our democracy. Why? Because it allows the European Commission to act decisively on media concentration. This is essential becaus

Madam President, Commissioner, in France almost 10% of children are victims of sexual abuse and girls are twice as victims as boys. In France, it is every three minutes that a child is the victim of rape, incest or sexual abuse. This update of the 2011 Directive is therefore a great step forward because it updates and unifies our definitions of child sexual abuse offences and it is a great step fo

Mr President, Commissioner, Radio Free Europe, for millions of Europeans, it is the voice of the West, the voice that has brought down authoritarian regimes and brought down the Iron Curtain. On 15 March, by a simple email, Trump ended seventy-five years of US defence of press freedom and freedom of information in countries where these freedoms are under threat. The announcement was severely criti

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, ‘freedom is the freedom to say that two and two are four. When this is granted, the rest follows. This quote from Georges Orwell has a particular resonance today in Donald Trump’s America. The search for truth, science based on facts: all this is swept on the altar of Trumpist ideology. For two months, for American universities, it is only froze

Madam President, Commissioner, promoting our culture also means defending and imposing ourselves. Our cultural compass is our compass of sovereignty. As attacks on our European model multiply, let us not give in to American threats. Abandoning our digital regulation and not defending tooth and nail the recognition of copyright in the face of artificial intelligence would be historic mistakes, the