What Vlad spoke about.

Mr President, Vice-President of the Commission, dear colleagues, Erasmus is definitely one of the best things Europe has ever done for young people. It started in 1987 with only 3,200 students. It has been 40 years since more than 18 million Europeans have benefited from the programme. He created the framework and created several hundred-euro scholarships that can change lives. Meanwhile, Erasmus

Mr President, Commissioner, Europe is bleeding out its health workforce, and we refuse the transfusion. Moreover, all too often, people who could actually help us address this problem are seen as a threat. Our population is ageing and needs more care, just as a wave of retirements will hit: 1 in 3 doctors and 1 in 4 nurses in the EU are over 55. Germany and France will lose almost half of their he

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, in a world marked by geopolitical tensions and strategic competition, access to medicines is no longer just a matter of public health. It is a matter of European sovereignty. We talk a lot about sovereignty and we talk in Bucharest, we talk in Paris, in Warsaw and in other European capitals. But in terms of medicine, the truth is simple: You cannot

Madam President, we are talking about two very important things. We talk about the environment and we talk about health. Both are essential things. We are talking about the most important things that man has, such as his health, respectively what we will leave behind. The implementation of the EU Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive is an important step for environmental protection and pu

Madam President, colleague Veryga was just mentioning the question earlier: Where does health begin? Health begins at home, health begins at school, health often begins in the kitchen. Obesity is often presented as the result of wrong individual choices. But the reality is more complex than that, as we all know. For many people, obesity is not simply a choice. It is the result of the socia

Madam President, President Lagarde, dear colleagues, European citizens are asking a simple question: can we bring inflation down and rebuild confidence that the economy will deliver opportunity again, and that it will do it in a sustainable fashion? The ECB is doing the hard work of restoring price stability. Now, Europe's political responsibility is to make that stability translate into investmen

Madam President, dear colleagues, what if we learned today that as of 1 March, patients in Europe would run out of half of their basic medicines? It sounds impossible, but it's not. We live in a world of threats, sanctions, breaking supply chains overnight. Strategic dependencies can be used as weapons. I saw that with Russian gas. People don't know what you've learned here: 80% of the basic medic

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, the European Union mechanism for the rule of law is not just bureaucracy, it is our early warning system for something, namely the political capture of the justice system. This happened in Poland, where the European Union applied Article 7 and the European Court of Justice applied penalties of EUR 1 million per day for the disciplinary regime that affected th

Mr President, we often talk about the safety of Europe in recent years, and it is good that we do so at least now, in the 12th hour. The safety of Europe and Europeans starts with protecting borders, but also with something very simple inside those borders: a patient who receives his treatment on time, whether in Bacau, Budapest, Berlin or Bruges. Today, our strategic autonomy in medicines is frag

Madam President, cancer is not only a health issue, it's also a test of our European values. Behind every statistic, there is a mother, a sister, a daughter, a wife, a friend. And far too often the chances of survival depend on the type of insurance they have, on their social status or the country they live in. In Romania, screening rates are among the lowest in Europe, as in other Central and Eas

Mr President, dear colleagues, in Romania, we have already seen what heatwaves mean – that means elderly people fainting at bus stops in Bucharest, farmers watching their crops burn, workers in Spain and Italy collapsing under the sun. These are not statistics. They are our neighbours, our families. Last summer, in just 12 European cities, heatwaves killed over 2 300 people. I can only imagine wha

Madam President, we usually don't have time for stories here. I'll start today with a story: On September 21, 2016, I was Minister of Health in Romania. 2016! The National Institute of Public Health then informed me about an increase from 7 to 675 confirmed measles cases in Romania. Since September 21, 2016, we have declared a measles epidemic in Romania. Since then, the measles epidemic in Romani

Mr President, Commissioner, the budget is not primarily about money, it is about priorities; Hence our concrete proposals for this budget. The EU budget must help companies to be more competitive in a single European market. It must also provide security throughout Europe and have a visible and concrete impact on people's lives, in better hospitals, affordable housing, modern schools, so that popu

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, in today's Europe, a child diagnosed with a rare disease has completely different chances of life, depending on the country in which he was born. In some Member States, there are simply no resources for diagnosis or treatment – sometimes precisely because we are talking about rare diseases and lack the necessary experience. It can't exist. Families

Mr President, we have, here, a first legislative product of the new Commission, and I thank the Commissioner for keeping his word for the first 100 days. I would also like to thank all those who contributed, especially those from Critical Medicines Alliance. Today we have a necessary step to protect patients in Europe from the crisis of essential medicines. In Romania, we have witnessed alarming s

Madam President, congratulations to the rapporteurs, congratulations to the Commission on today's achievement. Today, the European Union is doing more than reaffirming its support for the Republic of Moldova. Today, the European Union is taking a decisive step for the future that the citizens of the Republic of Moldova deserve. A future of prosperity, real reforms, an economy that creates opportun

Mr President, Commissioner, the lack of doctors and, in general, of medical staff in hospitals and beyond is already a reality, and a dramatic one. In 2024, the Emergency Hospital for Children in Brasov, Romania's sixth city, had three wards with a single doctor and another ward, the nephrology ward, which closed after the only doctor in that ward retired. It is a single dramatic example illustrat

Madam President, today I speak to you not only as a politician, but also as a citizen of Bucharest, the capital with the highest seismic risk in the European Union. In 1977, a devastating earthquake of more than 7 on the Richter scale claimed more than 1,500 lives and injured more than 11,000 people. It is certain that such an earthquake will happen again. Today, almost 50 years after that, half o

Mr President, the mental health crisis in our continent casts a long shadow across Europe. As you named it, Commissioner, it's a silent epidemic. Few problems, though, are more serious and threatening than the mental health issues of our children. While the medical aspect of it is paramount, I want to approach the crisis from a societal point of view, intrinsically linked to the scourge of child p

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, the European Union's medical device landscape is undergoing a major transformation. The old rules simply weren't equipped to handle the incredible advances that we've seen over the last couple of years. Let's think sophisticated software, nanotechnologies, 3D printing: game changers that demand a modern regulatory framework. On the