What Francisco spoke about.

Mr President, Mr High Representative, just as instability between Palestine and Israel did not start on 7 October, so instability in the Middle East did not start with Israel's attack on the consulate in Damascus, with Iran's irresponsible and criminal response to Israel recently. Let us remember that the West was complicit in a coup d'état in Iran in 1953, with the overthrow of Mohamed Mossadegh,

Madam President, Commissioner, since 2019 we have had major challenges in the European Union. We started the mandate with Brexit, the withdrawal of the UK – we managed to negotiate Brexit. We also had the European Green Deal all these years – we were able to negotiate the European Green Deal and a series of laws to deliver on it. We have had a pandemic – we have been able to fight the pandemic, we

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to say that we had a fantastic job at the meeting that preceded this discussion and that today will conclude with the vote, in the afternoon, on the guidelines and policies for the next budget. We had a very constructive debate. All the groups have had their sensitivities inserted in the document, which is why we have had a broad suppo

Mr President, recently, the Pentagon and its currently Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) investigative programme, named AARO, published a report considering that AARO has not discovered any empirical evidence that any sighting of UAP represented off-world technology or the existence of a classified programme that had not been properly reported to Congress. However, Luis Elizondo, the former d

Mr President, colleagues, Commissioner, the EU-Chile Association Agreement, in force since 2003, has significantly expanded bilateral trade, including in the agri-food sector, making our continent Chile’s third-largest trading partner. However, the trade deal now needs to be modernised in light of the changed geopolitical landscape. Therefore, we welcome the inclusion of the new sustainability pro

Mr President, Commissioner, as a Portuguese thinker and a dear friend of mine, Joaquim Granja, say, 'Inequality is the mother of all problems' and we must rethink how we combat inequalities in the European Union. There are already quite interesting experiences that indicate that we, perhaps, have to rethink the solution. Giving money to people is actually one of those ways that is quite simple. Th

Mr President, dear Commissioner, the 23-year-old Mohammad Ghobadlou was the ninth protester executed by the Iranian regime. At no time in the past three decades has the human rights situation been as grave as it is today under the presidency of Ebrahim Raisi – notoriously known for his role as a member of the ‘Tehran death commission’ which sent thousands of prisoners of conscience to the gallows

Mr President, dear Commissioner, the European Commission is currently finalising its upcoming proposal for an EU Space Law. This important initiative envisages common rules to address safety, resilience and sustainability of space activities and operations. However, in the security pillar there is a gap that needs to be filled. Currently, the EU does not have a harmonised and scientific system to

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, this is one of those debates which perhaps not only serves to launch for social media and the media, but it is a debate involving something very important which is the improvement of public services in our European Union. And perhaps that is why, because it is a debate that has involved many hours of debate, has involved many positions and has invo

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I believe that this point – and this tragedy, which unfortunately happened in Galicia and which is also present on the Portuguese coast – demonstrates a positive role for the European Union. And here we often see the extreme-right blaming everything: the globalists, the lack of inaction of the European Union. But it is good to note that the Europea

Mr President, let me be clear: no military solution will solve a political problem, and the numbers show us that reality. More than 18 000 Palestinians were murdered in Gaza. Israel also killed more than 100 UN representatives and 60 journalists. But to achieve peace we need politics, not bombs. Therefore, we need an immediate ceasefire with an exchange of hostages, a political deal to a two-state

Mr President, Commissioner, representative of the Council, we are here to discuss what a positive vote on the 2024 budget will be tomorrow. And despite being only 1% of the European Union’s GDP, the European Union budget does have an impact on all EU citizens and represents something more than 1%. Indeed, it represents this vision of unity between 27 Member States in specific areas that are essent

Madam President, I was going to talk about the massive lobby that the meat industry made within the European Commission to derail a historic promise made by President Ursula von der Leyen to improve animal welfare standards in the European Union. However, I will focus on the unfair, unjust and inhumane conviction of the lawyer and animal activist Wayne Hsiung in the United States. So Wayne was rec

Madam President, I would like to thank the petitioners, who managed to collect 1.5 million signatures. This mobilisation of civil society and many non-governmental organisations is really fantastic. But politics still surprises us. Here we had a speech from the Commission that talks a lot about animal welfare, which is very concerned, but then, when it comes back to putting the measures in its dra

Mr President, the Commission's omission from this work plan for 2024 is surprising: everything to do with animal welfare. Therefore, everything that was the review of animal welfare matters is missing. It does have a proposal to revise part of what is considered to be the transport of live animals, but it is basically throwing dust and sand into the eyes of citizens. We have the European Citizens'

Mr President, Commissioner, Spanish Presidency, I am going to give an example of the importance of the budget that we are debating here and which, if all goes well and we hope it will be adopted soon. Today, we have received some Erasmus students here in the European Parliament and it has been possible to understand how difficult it is for them, with the inflationary period, to manage the money th

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, this debate became fundamental when we went through a pandemic crisis and saw the importance of the workers who work and work in this sector, not only because they are fundamental to distributing the goods necessary for our existence, but because without them much of our economy does not work. Therefore, the proposals we are talking about here, as

Madam President, in Portugal, access to decent housing is no longer a luxury, it is a miracle. We are talking about a catastrophic situation that has pushed hundreds of thousands of people and families onto the streets, into social informality and economic marginality. They are citizens who work and cannot pay rent, they are Portuguese who can only survive in tents, they are entire families with c

Madam President, from what I share here, I believe that the European People's Party should change its name and designation to the European Populist Party. Because it talks about animals, and it is very concerned about livestock, but I do not see this dimension and this desire to protect animals when it comes to revising all the legislation on animal welfare. Zero. There is nothing they have done t

Mr President, I would like to raise here a question which is more philosophical and ethical. We have been led to debate and regulate, and rightly so, in the European Union landscape, artificial intelligence and the development of these technologies in the various phenomena and segments of society, namely in the economy, at work, in education, in intellectual property, in culture. But where are we

Madam President, Commissioner, we are talking here about the transition path towards decarbonisation and I believe it is crucial that we talk about agriculture, because this topic and this area have been used as a throwing weapon for this transition and we have seen this in Nature Restoration Law. And it is essential to break some myths here. We don't have a shortage of food production. In fact, a

Madam President, Commissioner, I believe that the Sustainable Development Goals are at risk, but they are at risk not because we lack the tools or the quantification of where we have to come from, but, above all, because we have political groups that effectively deny that there are challenges to be met by those goals. And I am talking about the far-right group – which is not represented here today

Madam President, reading the title of this report, 'Ensuring long-term food security and resilience of European agriculture', I assumed that we would see here a great focus on food waste which is about 20% in the European Union, but not. Therefore, there goes the argument that there is a lack of food, there is effectively a lack of distribution of it and access to food. Perhaps it was also the foc

Mr President, the Commissioner has warned that we are not doing enough, and I clearly agree, but also because, fundamentally, we ignore the impact of the livestock and milk industry, which has a high impact not only on greenhouse gas emissions, and I am talking about methane and CO2, but also on soil devastation and the destruction of aquifer resources. He also spoke here about the unsustainabilit

Mr President, the livestock industry is a weapon of collective destruction, but it is not me who says so. It is the scientific reports that demonstrate the negative impact of this industry on ecosystems, human health and, of course, on the welfare of billions of animals. But this industry is even more damaging because it benefits from a status quo cultural, where any attempt to implement alternati