What Bruno spoke about.

We are deeply concerned about the precarious situation of the steel sector and many energy-intensive industries in Europe today. Global overcapacity, illegal state aid from China, Trump's trade war and high energy prices, due to our dependence on fossil fuels, make our industry very difficult. We expect the Commission to swiftly come forward with results-oriented actions to create a framework that

Mr President, colleagues, waste not, want not – if buying something is difficult or expensive, then wasting what you already have is plain dumb. Yet that is what we do in Europe. We complain about high energy costs, about insecure supplies of crucial rare materials, of metals or magnets, and at the same time we throw away what we already have. Our citizens pay three times for this failure: we pay

Madam President, Commissioner, colleagues, Mario Draghi caused a bit of a panic when he proposed to build a competitive European economy based on energy independence, because he priced it at a cost of around EUR 800 billion of annual investments. But at current prices, we will be spending at least EUR 500 billion this year alone in buying fossil fuels outside of Europe, and probably another EUR 10

Mr President, colleagues, Europe will pay hundreds of billions of euros more this year for its addiction to fossil fuels – and apart from some luscious bonuses for all executives and a bit of investment in some football clubs probably – most of that cash will flow out of our continent. When desperate European governments subsidise fuel prices at the pump with money they don't have, we can borrow i

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, when energy prices exploded in 2022, there was one group in Belgium that slept on both ears and those were citizens who were members of energy cooperatives and who had invested in renewable energy themselves. Their energy bills increased by a total of 0 euros. Now that we are going through yet another turbulent period in the oil and gas markets, it

Mr President, my congratulations to Commissioner Jørgensen on having done what needed to be done, which should have been done a long time ago. Because even after the aggression in Crimea in 2014, after the invasion in 2022 and to this day, as Europeans, we continue to contribute billions to the Russian war machine that threatens us. It gives a whole new meaning to the concept of ‘digging your own

Mr President, Commissioner, our citizens are seeing negative electricity prices and high energy bills at the same time. Member States are shutting down electricity production because it cannot be connected to the grid, while in others energy prices are unreasonably high. Companies that want to invest are on waiting lists because they can't get a connection and in some streets you can't charge a ca

Madam President, Commissioner, colleagues, anyone with common sense knows that electrification is Europe's only realistic road to affordable energy and to competitiveness. And events like the blackout in Spain and Portugal make it crystal clear that robust grids are as essential to that as highways are to road transport. In that sense, the obsessive debate between renewables and nuclear today is s

Mr President, the Commission puts its finger on the wound in its action plan for the steel sector, but real action will not be taken for the time being. Keeping scrap in the EU for recycling is a justified ambition, but its implementation will depend on circular economy legislation, which we can expect at the earliest by the end of next year. Electrification is rightly put forward as the only way

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, even worse than having half a billion Europeans held hostage by Vladimir Putin is having half a billion Europeans held hostage by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The best way to escape this is to build our prosperity with the energy we produce and control ourselves. This is also the basis of your action plan. Let's take action now. The European En

Mr President, Commissioner, colleagues, Europe has performed a remarkable feat in reducing its dependency on Russian gas and oil after the attack on Ukraine. But the work is only half done. Not only are we still importing Russian gas, but by simply switching to other suppliers, we have found little more than a quick fix. Because if depending on Vladimir Putin was naive, then repeating the mistake

Madam President, Commissioner, colleagues, high energy prices are a social issue that today leaves millions of families struggling to afford basic comfort in their homes. And yet millions of those homes are leaking heat as if it were for free, because owners cannot afford a renovation. With energy prices higher than in competing markets, they are a burden on our industry's competitiveness. Yet at

Mr President, dear colleagues, besides agriculture, the Budapest Declaration rightly highlights the importance of industrial renewal through decarbonising as an absolutely key objective. We have actually reached a point where it makes little difference if you do it for the planet or you do it for the European steel industry, because without an effective net-zero policy, neither of them has much of

Mr President, let's be very clear on what crisis we are actually talking about here today in this debate, because European car manufacturers have, in recent years, followed a very deliberate strategy of building fewer but more expensive cars. This has created record profits for all of them in the past years. But it has come at an obvious cost for their workers and for European consumers – European