Speeches

As always, what should be a good idea becomes, once switched to the ‘reel’ of the Trilogues, an ill-balanced compromise, fraught with conflicting interests that forgets a central, but nevertheless important, element: the interest of the citizen! While we understand the value of intra-European collaboration on the assessment of certain health technologies, we do not accept that Member States are being dictated their health systems by the EU. Whether evaluations are mandatory or not, whether they are joint or not, the fact remains that they are intrinsically linked to product takeover decisions and price negotiation in each Member State. With this process, only health technologies that the EU sees fit can still be used and prescribed in the EU, where others will inevitably disappear due to a lack of reimbursement. This will lead, in the end, to the sheer disappearance of many medicinal specialties, yet very useful. We reject these administrative constraints and the judicialisation of processes that only serve to block freedom of care.

Madam President, Commissioner, 200 years of uncontrolled industrialization, of course it must stop. But, as always with Europe, you have to be more royalist than the king. The road map of the Paris agreements gives rise, here and now, to an equally uncontrolled overbidding. By raising decarbonisation thresholds over very short deadlines, Europe is taking citizens and businesses hostage, which is also at a very dangerous time of scarcity of energy sources and soaring prices. Let this not be the case, with the climate package, with all the decarbonisation dossiers presented, the one concerning light vehicles or trucks, new taxes, the creation of the cryptocurrency for the exchange of quotas or border taxes, the forced energy renovation of buildings all contribute to weakening our competitiveness and plunge Europeans into sustainable financial precariousness. And it is not the Social Climate Fund, a real pyromaniac firefighter's tool, that will be enough to cushion the shock. That is why we have been forced to table amendments rejecting all the plenary texts, as they are in our view excessive and doctrinal. The best is always the enemy of good. And, according to our great philosopher Pascal, who wants to make the angel makes the beast. It is urgent that the objectives, for some laudable of course, can be achieved, those of the Paris agreements, are achieved in these terms, otherwise the great economic disruption underway risks being as dangerous for Europeans as climate disruption.

Madam President, Commissioner, rapporteur, ladies and gentlemen, this new regulation on European data governance is of obvious importance because it determines the legal framework for the re-use of personal and non-personal data, either by non-profit organisations, known as data altruism – data provided voluntarily for purposes of general interest, such as medical research – or by commercial companies, providers of data sharing services, and only if they do not use them for their own purposes. It is therefore clear that the European Union, which has fallen far behind the USA and China in this area, must equip itself with the means to impose its own systems for the management, use and protection of the data of individuals, administrations and businesses in each State. We would therefore tend to support this first step towards harmonising the rules. But the system is fragile, because while reusable data is supposed to be anonymised, the European Union is again choosing the path of openness and competition, preventing any national sovereignty over vital data for each state. As for volunteering, there will only be time for this first project, as the question of relations with all public or private structures that will not participate in data sharing will quickly arise, some of which have been scalded by the example of the GAIA-X fiasco, an exciting European project, which has opened up to companies that have worked with the CIA or the NSA. So, if we obviously support the general approach, and despite the data protection regulation, we are sorry, we will abstain on this file.

Madam President, Commissioner, rapporteur, I, as coordinator of the Identity and Democracy Group, have been able to demonstrate, during this year and a half of the operation of our special committee, that coordinated European action brings little or no added value to the national plans of certain countries, in particular that of France – whose current ten-year strategy, the fifth part of a very successful action, justifies its being taken as a model for this text. This model is good in that it prioritises prevention, both in the exposure of everyone to all carcinogens and in excessive individual behaviours, such as excessive tobacco, excess alcohol, junk food or sedentary lifestyles. More than 40% of cancers could be prevented. Yes, too, massive screening and early detection, which are indispensable tools. Yes, also, to targeted and holistic research on the causes, diagnoses, treatment and follow-up of our patients. Yes to data exchange, particularly useful in rare cancer cases. Yes to access to quality care for all, without geographical or financial divide. Yes to the right to be forgotten, especially for young survivors. Yes to support for caregivers, and yes, in general, to any common sense idea. Unfortunately, throughout the text, in the name of equal care for all – essential, but not so defined – you can take the opportunity to prepare a legislative path to supranational constraints, which we believe are not very acceptable. With regard to alcohol or tobacco, we come close to constraints, even when there are only festive behaviours, rewards, or even, for some, forgetting poverty. It is even the European wine-growing sector that is at risk. What about food, where meat is becoming more and more stigmatised, all in favour of artificial food, which would have an irreproachable nutrient score? What about supporting the HERA agency in the face of a fight against CBRN risks that is binding on us – the COVID-19 crisis shows this – and that prefigures the Europe of defence, which we do not want? What can we say about the single market for generalised medicinal products, the fiasco of which has been seen in the purchase of vaccines? Finally, what about the tendencies of the text to be endangered up to certain articles of the TFEU, including Article 168? Thus, throughout our work, we remained in a certain wait-and-see attitude while collaborating rigorously. It now appears that some of the amendments proposed in plenary would alleviate the legislative rigour announced and could perhaps, if adopted, make us accept a text that I have once again said should have remained national.

Madam President, with this dossier from the European strategy for healthy and sustainable food, the Green Deal is developing its agricultural component on a compulsory basis. We can partially support it and we have clearly done so by imposing new elements or by voting on certain common-sense proposals on the need to shorten supply chains, to promote diversification of seeds and crops, to create strategic food stocks, and therefore to support European producers. But behind these proposals are two major risks. The first is the excessive penalisation of European yields by inconsistent legislation on phytosanitary and antibiotics and land-use change. Ignoring global strategic data, recent impact assessments are worrisome in this regard. Second gravity component: this text is essentially oriented towards a new way of feeding based on the constraint of harmonised and mandatory indicators, such as nutriscore, an index that we would like to consult to be reassured and which, in fact, takes us hostage by its dictate. Thus, the organic meat of Charolais or the French AOC roquefort get an "immangeable" score, unlike industrial food. All this because upstream there is the criminalisation of livestock farming under the influence of lobbies, such as the OPP foundation of Mr Dustin Moskovitz. All this to ultimately obtain 100% artificial food. Then, our vote will be conditioned on two decisive elements: a prior impact assessment and the abandonment of mandatory harmonised indicators.

Madam President, Commissioner, Minister, as soon as the European Union gets involved in creating a community of interests or a sectoral single market, failure is the answer. Like the ECSC at the time, the single market in electricity, revised just three years ago, designed to reduce the risk of power cuts by interconnecting networks, is causing precisely one, even in countries such as France, which has achieved sustainable self-sufficiency thanks to efficient and low-carbon nuclear power. Similarly, the European Union, which has only the word of value in its mouth, is provoking unprecedented speculation on the price of gas – plus 170% in one year –, partly a Russian-German gas, while banishing Russia from nations, and giving all its cryptocurrency meaning to carbon, which has risen from €10 to €60 per tonne in one year, even though CO2 is a rare gas, valued at 0.04% of fresh air. It will be necessary to ask the question of high-flying mystification. All this is completely disconnected from the realities, namely hot summers and cold winters. What about the 750 billion of the Green Deal, even paid in part by European taxpayers, which stirs up all lusts and favours renewable energies whose limits we already know? For the taxpayer, this is already energy poverty. So let the Member States manage their energy mix as they see fit and not share the deadlocks. Let's share the skills of the solutions, the solutions of the causes and not the solutions of the consequences.

Madam President, Commissioner, Commissioner Breton is calling for an end to naivety about industry and the development of European industrial policy. I would ask you, on behalf of my group, to do the same in health matters. Because the HERA agency, whose place it will have in terms of its undemocratic development vis-à-vis Members is not yet known, combines all the parameters of an announced failure with regard to the Europe of health. First of all, his extreme naivety, which consists in thinking that one can set up a civilian agency by imitating the American paramilitary agency BARDA by means of an expeditious montage of various civilian texts. All are redundant and share the same concerns, namely inventory management, shortage management and data banks, and all want clean financing. None is responsible for providing an effective alert or for operating the shortest possible channels between the Member States and the European Union. HERA can only be operational once Defence Europe is finalised, and we are relatively far from it. In the meantime, this is a false pretense that suggests to Europeans that they will be protected. A great deal of insecurity awaits them, as the role of the Member States, which so far have played their role perfectly in relation to the pandemic, has been minimised.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the two texts presented today are part of the great health package that the COVID crisis has accelerated and, above all, pushed to extremes. Because, on the grounds of finding solutions to an unprecedented crisis that no one has seen coming to Europe and, above all, whose management has been chaotic, the European Union is proposing regulations with potentially worrying effects. In addition to strengthening the role of the EMA in managing shortages of medicinal products, on which Member States have great difficulty agreeing, we are proposed to strengthen the Infectious Diseases Surveillance Agency. However, it was the same person who was 22 days late before speaking out on the new pandemic, denying its risks until mid-March 2020. A copy and paste on the model of the WHO, which has failed and whose serious consequences are known. And we would now like to entrust it with coordinating the response systems of each of the Member States, without increasing their human or financial resources. Similarly, we are proposed a new regulation on serious cross-border threats to health, which is nothing more or less than the dogmatic repetition of elements already dealt with in other texts on stockpile management, computer databases, transparency of trade and, above all, confirmation of the negation of the protective role of borders. The latter text is, in our view, particularly dangerous in that it lays the foundations for the future ERA agency, modelled on the American BARDA, intended to combat the risks of bacteriological war. In the end, however, it is the weakening of Article 168 TFEU, on public health, which is likely to occur, thus taking control of all national prerogatives in the field of health and without bringing, on the contrary, any added value. This is a new instrumentalisation of the crisis for the benefit, it must be said, of the Europeanists. For this reason, we do not consider both texts to be acceptable.