What Michiel spoke about.

Mr President, Europe is fast becoming a second-class economy. Our debts are rising, our regulatory and tax burden is a nightmare. In the days of the free market, with Europe as the leading industrial player, politics gave citizens and businesses the freedom to: the freedom to do business, to trade and, yes, to make money. Today, Brussels politics is taking away that freedom. The European Commissio

Mr President, this is it: our last plenary session in Strasbourg. The European elections are coming. On June 6th we go to the polls and change hangs in the air. Our parents and grandparents once signed for a common market, but secretly got a dominant political Union with flags, national anthems, common debts and now even towards their own army, when the voters never asked for it or voted for it. I

Madam President, I would like to congratulate both rapporteurs on the work done and the results obtained. We support and share the commitment to combat forced labour. On these forced-labour ban rules, however, we have a few of our concerns. First, the absence of an impact assessment remains a crucial point. Despite good intentions, it is essential to assess whether its costs are justified and reas

Mr President, the drums of war are thundering again. As the war in Ukraine continues, fewer and fewer European politicians can keep a cool head. For example, the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, like the French and Italian European Commissioners, wants to switch to a real war economy, financed with common EU debt on the account of the Dutch, of course. But what exactly does a war

Well, as a former accountant and consultant, I am happy to answer that question, as there is a new branch in the accounting industry: That's the branch. And for that branch, companies are going to look at how they report on their value chain. And the way in which they report is then passed on to the SMEs, to the suppliers. In the end, these are the merits... (Call) Google "CS Triple D" agree! Goog

Mr President, Europe is becoming a second-class economy. Global economic competition is fierce and fierce. Instead of improving Europe's business and business environment, the EU is pricing itself out of the market with stifling regulation. The European Directive on Corporate Due Diligence (CS Triple D) adds to this. This directive supposedly aims to make the economy more sustainable, but in reali

Mr President, in 2019, when Ursula von der Leyen begged the European Parliament to vote for her Commission presidency, she promised better regulation for businesses. She even promised a ‘one in, one out’ principle: For every new EU law, one had to come out first. Five years later, big companies are leaving us. The manufacturing industry is collapsing and almost a third of the rules are hardly feas

Mr President, how the European digital identity came about is an affront to democracy. A majority motion was adopted in the Dutch Parliament in December 2022, calling on State Secretary for Digitalisation Van Huffelen not to agree to the Council conclusions on the European digital identity. This entails serious risks, such as the central storage of data and techniques used in an unsafe manner. Van

President, Ursula von der Leyen, the Brussels kibble pilot, wants a second term as President of the European Commission. Wherever ‘VDL’ – as it is affectionately referred to here – came, misery arose: at the German Defence Ministry, and now also after five years in the European Commission. It brought us NextGenerationEU, an expensive and unnecessary Corona Recovery Fund for which the Netherlands g

Mr President, President Lagarde, since the late 2000s, the European Central Bank has been trying to play God by printing money as the bread came from heaven. President Lagarde, the core objective of your ECB is price stability, but your institution deals with everything: saving high-debt countries, buying bad loans, climate change and a digital euro that no one has asked for. But the major economi

Mr President, it is high time we made a distinction between climate change and climate policy. Yes, we see global temperatures rising and yes, human behavior is accelerating this. But the current climate policy is a complete hoax. If you really want to do something about climate change, we are now starting to build nuclear power plants, focusing on market-oriented innovation and climate adaptation

Mr President, last week, Europe – and Brussels in particular – was awakened by angry farmers. Why are they so angry? That's because the EU is constantly overloading them with more and more rules. The Commission—Von der Leyen promised less regulatory burden, but does the opposite. Friday is an important day, because then Member States will decide whether to give the green light to the so-called due

Madam President, I thank you, Commissioner McGuinness and all the colleagues who have contributed to this very important debate. As I’ve already highlighted, the best feature of the Instant Payments Regulation for citizens is that it takes the EU closer to frictionless payments. This Regulation is important for Europe’s strategy to encourage European innovation, and we do this by making credit tra

Madam President, dear Commissioner, dear colleagues, let me first thank the Commission for its excellent initiative. That was the basis for the work done by the Parliament and the Council. With the agreement on instant payments, we deliver on an opportunity to do something that people and businesses truly care about. They will be able to transfer money within 10 seconds at any time of the day, inc

Mr President, more free trade means more and better jobs in Europe. But the EU is becoming less and less of a free trade bloc and more and more of a selfish, self-centered, protectionist bloc. Take climate policy. That would be a global problem that we would have to solve globally. But the EU is putting forward a green European industrial policy and carbon border taxes. This does not create the jo

Mr President, serving the public interest is a great honour. Unfortunately, not everyone in Brussels shares that same belief. The President of the European Council, Charles Michel, will lead the European elections in June. However, its mandate, which is the Union's main function, runs until November. But for Mr Michel it is not a problem, he simply leaves earlier. With this decision, he is not onl

Houses are unaffordable for young people. Food prices continue to rise. It is important to look at the root cause: policy of central banks. This has driven inflation. This has caused the housing market to collapse. Add to that an ill-considered energy transition, uncontrolled migration, rising protectionism and increasing regulatory pressure, and you have the toxic cocktail we are now in. The solu

Mr President, on 6 October, there was a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. On 7 October, Hamas decided to break it with a barbaric attack against peaceful civilians, including Europeans. Immediately, we saw the rise of bothsidesism and the victim of this brutal attack, the State of Israel, became the accused – also by some in this House. The accusations are coloniser, apartheid, state, war crimi

Mr President, the world is moving into the ‘blocisation’ of geopolitics. We see the war in Ukraine, tensions between the United States and the People’s Republic of China rising, and the attack of Hamas on Israel. It all exposes a deep rift between liberal democracies, on the one hand, and authoritarian and theocratic regimes, on the other. Consequently, protectionism is on the rise, and a decline

Mr President, few people are warm before the European elections. Across the Union, only half of the voters turn up. In the Netherlands barely 40%. I hear colleagues say that this turnout must be increased. But with the proposals in this report, that will not work. Since 2014, you have been pushing the spitzenkandidaten system: pan-European lead candidates who are unfamiliar travel across the EU an

Mr President, EU businesses are increasingly suffocated by a barrage of laws and regulations. Entrepreneurship is becoming increasingly difficult. In the banking sector, which still provides 80 % of corporate loans to SMEs, 20 % of employees are currently engaged in compliance. To clarify, in the Netherlands there are twice as many compliance officers than district agents. The EU provides 90% of t

The Netherlands is in a housing crisis. Middle-class people and especially young people can no longer buy a home. Twelve years ago, the same house cost half as much as it does today. Project developers did not lose their homes on the paving stones. The house buyer was king. What happened in that short period of time? Now a lot of people have been added by too much immigration and too few homes hav

Madam President, the European Union does not need to be enlarged; it is big enough as it is. As happened too many times. President von der Leyen created a PR moment for herself while overstepping her mandate and bypassing the Member States. Madam President, in my country, the Netherlands, there is no appetite for further EU expansion. We already pay the highest amount of EU contributions per capit

Mr President, the communications of the EU on the atrocities committed by Hamas were a mess. President von der Leyen, as she has done on multiple occasions, overstretched her mandate. While I personally commend her support for Israel, she bypassed the leaders of the Member States. Representative Borrell did the same, and I would like to add that his position on this one is very, very sketchy. Appa

Mr President, the call for more funds is echoing again in the plenary. Good EU tradition is once again being demanded for more money. After the superfluous NextGenerationEU of more than EUR 800 billion and the unforeseen increased interest costs, which were not budgeted, new funds need to be created again. It can't go on. In our view, the call for new own resources, a code word for EU taxes, is no