What Dirk spoke about.

Oh my God, this will help nothing in saving the ICC. What I need is the stuff that we talked about: we need to move to make sure the transactions work. What I would also like to know is, how far are we ready to go in negotiating with the Americans? Because what they want to do is change the Statute of Rome, they want to restrict its jurisdiction to only signatory countries, which means they would

Madam President, first of all, it's good we had an outcome of the European Council last week, and I'm very happy with the support. But, you know, the ICC will not survive with support alone. For me, this means, first of all, that the ICC needs European companies to continue providing financial services and, right now, the outlook is quite bleak, I have to be honest. Primary US sanctions only apply

Mr President, Commissioner, I'm happy that I was after your first clarification because we can go a bit deeper now – because I think everyone does agree: we are in a massive housing crisis. Now, what I don't want to do, Mr Commissioner, is to create an alibi for failing national governments on housing policies. I fear that if we take this road that you are proposing now, this is very much a possib

Madam President, I said I was going to use this to thank my colleagues, which is what I will do. My gratitude, of course, to Commissioner Šefčovič, Charlotte, Sofia and the team, the Danish and Cypriot presidencies, DG TAXUD and the many customs experts who helped make this very important and urgent reform possible. Also to President Metsola, because we created a new procedure to appoint an author

Madam President, during the COVID-19 lockdowns, Europeans massively turned to the internet and started buying online. Since then, e-commerce has been supercharged. And if you go to the big hubs in Schiphol or Liège or Charles de Gaulle, you will see piles of thousands of individual packages – but also speed and efficiency, because Europe has the biggest but also the easiest market in the world to

Well, if anything, AI is confronting us with human imperfection – with how absolutely wrong we have been for centuries. So, who tells us that the next Nobel Prize for medicine will not go to an AI model? And maybe even the next peace prize. That is, I think, the crucial task we have as legislators, but we also need to be clear: we will not simply take up this challenge by updating an AI Act or by

Madam President, Madam Commissioner, I think everyone agrees here that AI's transformation and disruption potential is absolutely total. It is changing the way we wage war, and it will be decisive on how we actually live in peace in the coming, let's say, 50 years. The Commission, therefore, has this generational task to lay the foundations of what is our European life, but in this digital world o

Madam President, well, in the EPP, we are very happy that Mr Šefčovič is travelling also to the US to protect our economy from the very negative consequences of trade chaos. And we're also very happy that Commissioner Ribera is here today to speak about the DMA. I would like to introduce a company to you, a Chinese company, and I will say now: they will be a gatekeeper – but over a couple of years

Madam President, let me start by saying that on King's Day, it is quite interesting that the Dutch Vice-President of the EIB is sent to Strasbourg to do this debate, but your presence is very much appreciated. I see you sitting on the side of the Council – maybe that's logical because the Council is actually putting most of the money into your budget. The European budget is actually quite small wh

Madam President, yes, it's good. I think the vacancies that you have of especially office space in inner cities is an issue. But this is also something that has to be dealt with on a local level. I think the challenge here is every time, and I have the same feeling around short-term rentals that are we trying to create a European solution for a very local problem that is very specific for a city l

Mr Van Lanschot, I think we have enormous expertise in the different regions of Europe. And we can strengthen it. In one part of Europe it is trade, in another part cyber and somewhere else green technology. We should not think that we should all do the same thing in 27 countries. We don't all need everything. What we need, for example, is that our investors, the start-ups and the scale-ups, have

Mr. Van Lanschot, I think I just indicated that. I think that, as long as we stick to the idea that all the good of Europe must be fairly distributed among the 27 Member States, we will not take any steps in the economic field. Because the financial markets in some countries are just not the same as they are in other countries. I would see a much more flexible form of collaboration in front of me.

There was a call for my resignation, Madam President, which is obviously not up to you, first of all. If you ask me, of course bureaucracy is an issue, but the Omnibuses are not the formula to get our growth machine back on. The Omnibuses are vertical corrections, which we need, but the real stuff we need are horizontal integration ideas about the economy and about creating our wealth. So, yes, we

Madam President, the Draghi Report is already two years old, and we are here for I don't know how many debates already on the same report – it might have been the fifth or sixth or seventh. I think the key question is that what we do in this House is very much redistribution of a budget and of things that Member States can get back from Europe. But defence and economy don't work like that. The mon

Madam President, thank you for your efforts to create a bit of a debate here, because in the meantime we have learned that behind the very patriotic language of defending Mr Orbán lies also the readiness to throw their own businesses – French businesses, Dutch businesses, everyone that is actually trying to do something in the internal market – they are ready to throw them under the bus, because t

Mr Sanchez, that was a very fast presentation. You said you liked walking around in Budapest. I think many of us do, but ask business people from outside of Hungary – to do business in Hungary, they need envelopes to get contracts, envelopes with money inside. The services are breaking down for normal citizens. The internal market rules are not respected. So I don't really understand, French busin

Mr President, we live in the midst of the greatest social experiment in modern history and the subjects, those are our children. I'm talking about the influence that algorithms and social media have on their development. Neuroscientists, psychiatrists and developmental psychologists have been ringing the bell for a long time. The mental health of our children is very much under pressure. Many pare

Mr President, Vice-President of the Commission, Shein is cheating. Child pornography is completely unacceptable, but unfortunately only the tip of the iceberg. Every day our market is flooded with illegal and downright dangerous products, toxic vapes, make-up and jewelry or combustible batteries and electronics. Consumer associations have recently concluded that 70% of Shein and Temu's products do

Mr President, if Hungary wanted to join the European Union today, it would not be possible. As Orban builds palaces, hospitals, schools and public facilities for ordinary Hungarians are getting worse by the day. That is the dubious honor of the thoroughly corrupt governments of Viktor Orbán. Just when we thought it couldn't get any worse, it turns out that the Hungarian government has deployed a n

Madam President, the colleague just called us all 'traitors'. Yes. And under certain laws, traitors are dealt with in a certain way.

Mr van den Berg, I find it very special that you attribute to me the power and the strength to be the brake to stopping this entire continent. When it comes to economic integration, there is no brake, not even in the NSC election programme. We go through with it, too, and certainly, when it comes to protecting the livelihood of Dutch people on the Dutch market, of Europeans on the European market.