What Ľudovít spoke about.

Madam President, first, I wanted to thank all the shadow rapporteurs and also MEPs for the lively debate. I think it also showed that this is an important topic. Second, I wanted to highlight maybe three issues which are really important, and I felt a little bit of misunderstanding in the plenary. The first one, the regime is optional. It is optional not only for the companies but also for the Mem

Dear President, Commissioner, colleagues, Europe is facing a new geopolitical and economic reality. Rules matter less than they once did. Power and scale matters more. In this context, our single market remains one of the most underutilised assets at our disposal. The European Union is clearly punching below its weight. We are failing to fully leverage the strength that comes with providing access

Madam President, Commissioner, colleagues, given the current complexity of the global economic environment and heightened geopolitical uncertainty, the European Union should focus much more on policy priorities which are entirely in its hands. And the single most important among them is the single market. Europe can create a lot of economic momentum from internal sources simply by removing obstacl

Madam President, Vice-President, Commissioner, colleagues, the global digital landscape is dominated by giant companies, despite Europe's enormous consumer base. No company with a valuation over 500 billion was created from scratch in the last 50 years, and there are only two European companies in the global top 20. Start-ups are often leaving Europe to scale up elsewhere. What does it mean? Europ

Mr President, Commissioner, colleagues, the EIB Group is a very important financial institution in achieving European policy goals and since we have new challenges, I think we also need a reprioritisation of the work of the EIB. I will mention basically four areas where I think that we need to prioritise things and all those four areas are connected to innovation and competitiveness. The first one

Madam President, Commissioner, colleagues, the Recovery and Resilience Facility is an important testing case for the European Union for at least two reasons. The first one is that there is a unique combination of reforms and investments to finance the green and digital transitions, and it might be a useful tool to prioritise our economic policies. The second reason is that joint borrowing to finan

Mr President, Commissioner, the diagnosis is clear. Europe has a lot of savings on the one hand, and the desperate need for investments on the other. And there is no functional bridge between the two sides. Deep and liquid capital markets, more risk‑taking and equity investments are absolutely necessary to harness the full potential of an economy with 450 million people. Attempts to create a capit

Madam President, Commissioner, dear colleagues, in the past, people around the world have been kidnapped from European cars. They were synonymous with progress, quality, exclusivity. However, the industry is gradually losing competitiveness, threatened by state-subsidised electric cars from China, as well as fully privately funded models from the United States. In addition, new tariffs on the othe

Mr President, Commissioner, colleagues, I have three points. The first one is that the Competitiveness Compass is an important additional step after the Draghi and Letta reports. But still, it is just a compass. It shows the way forward, but without action it will not get us any closer to our main goal of regaining the competitiveness of the Union. So we need to seize the momentum and act swiftly.

Madam President, I just wanted to thank all the stakeholders for supporting this initiative, because I guess that this clearly shows that Parliament is now going in the right direction. This is about using the funds which are lost in the VAT regime every year for much better purposes. And since we are in need of reforming our budgets and making funds available for consolidation, in many countries,

Mr President, colleagues, I am very glad that our first debate after the vote for the new Commission is about competitiveness, and I am also glad that there is a significant overlap between the Budapest declaration and the programme of the new Commission. There is more a broad consensus in this House that actually we need to close the innovation, skill and security gaps vis-à-vis our global compet

Mr President, Commissioner, dear colleagues, the European Union must manage two major transformations in the coming decades - the green and the digital - with an ageing population. This mission is doomed from the beginning, unless we get rid of the vices of the twentieth century. What are they? Firstly, we should not prepare young people for a particular profession, but we need to teach them the s

Mr President, Vice-President, Commissioner, colleagues, for many of our voters, Brussels is a synonym for bureaucracy. This is problematic for at least two reasons. First, it helps populists and far-right parties to attack the union and overshadows important achievements at the EU level. Second, it creates unnecessary burden for our companies and we are losing the global race, especially in the ar

Madam President, as we also see from this debate, a real single market is something that we can build on in this House, and we must do our utmost in the coming years to extend this concept to other sectors. I would like to draw attention to three things that are a priority for me. First of all, the world has become smaller and the markets have changed a bit. The digital world is dominated by the b