What Kai spoke about.

Mr President, a potter in Estonia sells a few mugs a month to Italy and Germany. Because of the new packaging rules, the paperwork now costs more than the mugs themselves. The businesses who built the single market, one parcel at a time, are now considering whether to stop selling abroad because they just can't afford it anymore. The principle is right – if you put packaging on the market, you pay

You work the full month, you do overtime, sometimes you even work with a cold, to then hand over 70 % of your salary just to have a roof over your head – and you haven't even bought groceries yet. All while conservatives and the far right block emergency housing protections to protect speculators. That's not just a headline in Spain, it's the reality crushing an entire generation from Warsaw to Li

Imagine this: you throw euro banknotes into a fire. What happens next? Exactly. The banknotes burn. That's what the EU budget does today. Right now, we are waiting for climate disasters to happen and then we scramble to pay the bill. That's us right there, funding preventable fire. As we debate the next long-term EU budget, every euro we spend – whether on transport, infrastructure, energy, agricu

I just heard you call for additional funding for infrastructure, so my question is very simple: will you let action follow those words? Will you be there to also protect our budget from being used efficiently? Will you protect the 'do no significant harm' principle in the MFF? Will you be there to implement climate adaptation mainstreaming in our EU spending? And will you be there to actually also

Madam President, 'Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed on your phone, with footage getting closer to where you live until you're the one filming it' – you know that quote. From Navaluenga to Frontino or Neufchateau, climate change is no longer at the doorsteps. Yet, as the flames are getting closer, the right doubles down on fake culture wars to keep you distracted. The rea

Madam President, Commissioner, colleagues, the data is clear: the next climate refugees will be us. It will be families in Spain, Portugal or Italy forced to leave towns their grandparents built because the climate is just too hot. In Andalusia right now, experts are using crop planting methods once reserved for the Sahara, because that's what Europe's soil is turning into. Yet some still prefer j

Mr President, recently I went to the supermarket and came back with 200 g of strawberries for EUR 5. I get daily messages from people worried about fuel prices, rising electricity bills and grocery prices. I always talk about better trains, because I want people to travel Europe by train as easily as possible, but equally because I want people to have affordable transport and groceries. Compared t

Mr President, dear colleagues, I am speaking on behalf of our shadow rapporteur Tilly Metz. As the Greens-EFA we support the mandate for the trilogues on the roadworthiness package as already voted in the TRAN Committee. This is a compromise and we do not have the level of ambition in all parts as we would have liked, but the mandate also brings concrete improvements. For the first time, for examp

Madam President, dear colleagues on the conservative and far-right benches, you want to talk competitiveness. So let's do that. Look at the news. Just days after the strikes in the Middle East, gas prices were already skyrocketing. That's the real tax on European business – our crippling dependence on imported fossil fuels. Yet you use competitiveness as a trump card to unpick the ETS, our most po

Mr President, a young woman in Madrid stares at her phone at midnight, wondering how rent suddenly takes 70 % of her of her salary. Thousands of kilometres away in Berlin, a young man is doing the exact same maths, feeling the exact same panic in his stomach. Because despite what national leaders and far-right politicians are telling you, your struggles are European struggles. From Porto to Tallin

Mr President, we are strongly committed to a good and stable relationship with the US. That won't change. But, as Volt, we cannot support this deal. It's enough. Sometimes when your partner crosses a line, you have to tell them. And the US, or rather Trump and his cabinet, have been crossing lines with Europe for a while now, on a daily basis. We have to stand up. A good trade deal should work for

Madam President, as long as we depend on fossil fuels, we will be vulnerable to those who control fossil fuels. Can we control who rises to power? No, but we can control how dependent we are on them. Yet, Europe keeps repeating the same mistake. After Putin invaded Ukraine, we reduced our dependency on Russia. But instead of actually breaking the cycle, we simply shifted it, this time to the US. T

Mr President, the EU will recognise and enforce court judgements from Montenegro and Albania and the other way around. This is an important and welcome step to bring both countries closer to the EU, strengthen ties and eventually for Montenegro and Albania to become members of the European Union. This is great news. We fully support that part. At the same time, across Europe, many citizens are sce

Thank you for accepting my blue card. Many of your colleagues, and you as well, talk a lot about the Solidarity Fund and about the reaction to those emergencies now. Of course, I agree that we need to react to those emergencies and help the people on the ground, but you are not talking at all about a strategy of how we can adapt for the future. We cannot just in even more severe situations, and th

This is exactly what I am talking about. We need to have the structure to actually have our whole budget, the whole way we do European politics, going forward to a direction that is ready to tackle those problems. But this is not the case, and many of our policies are acting against our own values and those need to adapt to climate change. And I think we really need to be aware of this and make su

Madam President, one and a half years ago, extreme floods in southern Europe, in Spain, killed hundreds of people. Last week, storms of similar intensity hit again, this time especially Portugal. None of this is simply bad luck. These floods were a predictable possibility of a raging climate. In Portugal, we saw how quickly floods can overwhelm infrastructure, cutting roads, power and access to ba

Madam President, the world we designed our politics for no longer exists. Power politics are back. International cooperation is framed as weakness, and many Europeans wonder if the EU is still strong enough to shape this new world order. It is. And now we have a unique opportunity to prove that the EU‑India trade agreement is not just another trade deal. Together, the EU and India represent around

Madam President, why are we even debating if people should get compensated when their plane is delayed? Of course they should. But this isn't just about delays or compensation, is it? It is about how we do politics. Passenger rights have successfully protected people, not profits. Now, some governments want to change that. But let me be clear: Parliament says no. No to less compensation. No to cha

Mr President, Trump wants one thing: a divided Europe, because a divided Europe is easier to break. And the saddest part is that some people in this House are playing along. But a united Europe is a stronger Europe. Joint climate disaster funds, cross-border rescue teams, early warning systems built together – that is Europe at its best, united in crisis, stronger than any single nation could ever

Mr President, 1 in 25 people at the COP30 was a fossil fuel lobbyist – the same lobbyists who are getting conservatives and the far right in this House to do their dirty work for them. It is you, more than half of this Parliament, that spent months weakening Europe's climate targets, so that we would show up at COP30 with as little leverage as possible. As a result, we looked unsure and smaller th

Mr President, German car manufacturing – or, in von der Leyen words, 'the pride of Europe' – is fighting for its life. We are watching others win a race we should be leading. Why? Because we have an establishment that is terrified of losing voters to the right. Those who called this debate today are in the business of fear tactics and, as we saw in the introduction already, also of plain lies. The

Mr President, heatwave, Hitzewelle, ola de calor – omnipresent last summer, this summer and probably every future summer from now on. But still, we are not taking adequate action to fight the root cause of the problem: climate change. Heat wave after heat wave. Commission President von der Leyen yesterday talked here about heatwaves and I hear and support what you say, Commissioner, but at the sam

Mr President, 51 years of Turkish troops on EU ground is shattering trauma for Cyprus. For half a century, the island and its people have remained divided. A European capital cut in half. But the deeper tragedy is that generation after generation of Cypriots have been let down. Let down by leaderships that lack courage, let down by politicians who preferred nationalism over compromise and let down

Mr President, what could the EU look like in 2030? 500 million citizens in the best and most resilient democracy in the world. A new union with more countries. For us, in the current 27, it means economic opportunities and a stronger defence union; 35 countries collaborating together. But how will the EU work with 35 countries? With 35 countries, it will be totally impossible. There's only one sol

Mr President, rail is the backbone of public transport in Europe, or at least it should be. But as long as buying train tickets feels like navigating through a maze, rail will struggle to compete. As long as passengers do not enjoy full passenger rights protection, people will not trust rail. Not because it's slow, but because it's hard to access. The upcoming initiatives on rail ticketing must fi