Speeches

(NL) Mr President, what this Commission is proposing to the Council and to this Parliament, and what this Commission is imposing on a European population that, exhausted, is increasingly turning away from it, without taking that signal into account, is more European Union, more powers and more money in a multi-annual budget that takes on hallucinatory proportions. To this end, we are increasingly interfering with our social and industrial policies, with the digital and economic freedom of citizens, with their right to property, with more and more centralised control over our citizens by a European Commission that, on top of that, is militarising more and more in order to be able to drag us into an increasingly hopeless conflict. This Commission also always wants more migration and even abuses the Erasmus project for this purpose. What the European population is asking for is less: less European Union and less of everything that this Commission wants more of. This continent wants less Ursula and, more specifically, preferably no more Ursula at all.

Mr President, there can be no doubt about it: Beyond the protected bubble of this European Parliament and beyond the elite club of people interested in its political survival, von der Leyen would have long been evicted. Its Commission is the great conglomerate of self-interest and the trade deal With Trump is undoubtedly an icing on the cake of incompetence that has been baked by her over the past five years. Leaving our international trade policy to a multilateral institution like the EU has not brought us any benefits. It does not take into account the different interests. The stability given as a reason for the unheard-of concessions is a fallacy. Trump has, as it should be, thought of his country's self-interests. Not von der Leyen. That's the problem, Europe's problem.

Mr President! Could George Orwell's Big Brother have been a Big Sister? We now know the answer: Yes, of course! Emily O’Reilly, the former Ombudsman of the European Union, described the phenomenon. A supreme, unelected and untransparent corporate culture at the top of the European Commission is making opacity worse and worse. I was always, she says, at my inconvenience with the ‘mighty consiglieri’ from the cabinet of the President of the Commission (a word used to describe mafia advisers). Everything comes from above, top down. Information is withheld by order from above. This is the culture: That withholding and the reluctance to hand over information is, I still quote, disturbing. So we know that there is a Big Sister, surrounded by ‘powerful consiglieri’, at the head of a Europe that has long ceased to be a cooperation, but an empire, a Big Sister empire modelled on Orwell. Today we add yet another horrific chapter: Regulation 1083. The creation of a so-called European Council for Media Services. The centralization of power over the media is Orwell copy paste. This will 100% certainly be the future Ministry of Truth. With unclear definitions and powers aimed at neutralising the opposition. At the top is really a sublime version of the typical Orwellian lie. The aim of the regulation is, I quote, the protection of media freedom and pluralism. I conclude that this European Union is becoming a totalitarian regime. May our grandchildren forgive us for letting it get so out of hand.

Mr President, where at this moment a rain of ballistic missiles seems to be the reality of the day, the fate of one man may seem futile. But the fate of Djalali is well known. He has been innocently sentenced to death and has now been imprisoned for more than nine years, in an increasingly worrying medical condition. His fate can go two ways. A regime on the knees can be fierce. The weakest are the first victims: the civilian population, but also the people in the hands of the regime, dissidents, political prisoners and hostages. For example, the day before yesterday in the confusion, ten prisoners were shot. It can also go in a different direction. The Iranian regime has different intentions than holding one person. If nuclear and other deals are concluded, when the weapon clashes, the international community must not lose sight of the fate of these and other Western hostages. So here and now my call: It's time to let Djalali go home.

Mr President, are we not going to be holding debates here every month and wailing for hours about every action now being taken in the United States to start the new era? We should put our energy into accepting this new time. For the times of multilateralism, the times of the moral superiority of international organisations and the times of foreign interference by unlimited subsidies and manipulations from the Soros web are over. Leftist and globalist times are over, and the trampling of national identities and nation states is over. Identity and freedom will once again become the engines of industrial and technological development. The times of the current majority in the European Parliament should be over and make way for the new era quickly. We must prevent the current shaky majority here in this European Parliament from plunging Europe into backwardness and into a migration pact and a Green Deal religion that will only impoverish us.

Mr President, I wish I could somewhat comfort the many panicking left-wing and left-liberal and the many globalist and multilateralist colleagues here in the hemisphere. With Donald Trump taking office in Washington, there will be no end to democracy. On the contrary: It is a celebration, a celebration, of democracy. What is a problem, however, is the reputation of the European Union in today's Washington. In my view, the European Union is rightly regarded among those in power in the United States as a centrally managed planned economy with far too many rules, far too much rigidity, too little margin for manoeuvre. dealmaking and negotiating. And on top of all that, a huge compulsive left-wing tendency to restrict freedom of expression. Today's European Union is at odds with the new era that started yesterday on the other side of the Atlantic. A new era in which the multilateralist European Union will be to a large extent a handicap for the high-performing Member States in Europe. We Patriots for Europe want to join this new era. A new patriotic time, which we hope will soon arrive here in Europe, Member State after Member State, election after election, in the coming years. Yesterday is a day of hope.

Mr President, the Group of the European Liberal, Democrat and Reform Party believes that the progress and advancement of new technologies are a danger, because they can be used to – I quote – ‘manipulate and radicalise young people through hate speech and anti-democratic language’ – end of quotation. This Mickey-Mouse language of political correctness sets the tone and immediately rules out serious debate. The regime that is still in power here in the European Union draws an old look woolly here. newspeak open, to demand, on the basis of vague concepts, measures against the free flow of information through the media outlets of modern society. Commissioner Breton, who made a failed attempt to intimidate Elon Musk from Europe when he started interviewing Donald Trump, has already disappeared. With Commissioner Jourová we seem to end up in the fairy tale of the bad wolf or in an episode of Harry Potter. A quasi-religious form of fanaticism it seems, if we hear her speak seriously about Elon Musk as a "promoter of evil with monstrous powers in his hands" And when she says that "she is really scared by digital platforms in bad hands". With such a European Commission, of course, we no longer need communism. There is little point in commemorating yesterday's revolt of the Hungarian people against the Russian tanks in 1956 if we now give freedom into the hands of a European Union that is no better than the Soviet Union in terms of freedom.

Mr President, despite – I am sorry, ladies and gentlemen – the blablabla in this report, as, for example – and I quote –: “upward social convergence” or the “economic governance architecture” and more, convergence is less than ever. The best example of this in this Semester is the President of your European Council, namely the Kingdom of Belgium. Belgium is lonesomely dangling at the bottom of the European tail with a total deficit of 27.5 billion or 4.6% of gross domestic product. In 2029, according to the Belgian Planning Bureau, this will rise to 39,4 billion or 5,6 % and a total debt of 117 %. This morning, the National Bank of Belgium itself raised the alarm in all Belgian media. The irresponsibility of the country is increasingly confirmed by the figures. So if you converge, I would suggest that you prepare for an orderly partition of Belgium.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, today we are at a crossroads. We need to make a decision that will have profound consequences for the freedoms of European citizens and their privacy in the future. The proposed legislation on a digital identity for the entire European Union hides a dangerous, if not a sinister, agenda. The idea of a digital wallet in fact puts the finishing touches to a path that will lead us to the total control society. Whether it's Big Brother or Brave New World: I'll leave it in the middle. It is a European Union in which every transaction, every movement, every interaction is recorded. A continent where citizens' freedoms can be made dependent on a digital green light. This isn't going to be comfort, it's going to be a leash. Not a wallet, not a wallet, but a prison. Since the creation of this proposal, privacy experts have sounded the alarm bell and warned. After all, how voluntary is a system that can enforce compliance with rules centrally by allowing access to essential services and thus ipso facto not allowing it? From this, the European Union can become a comprehensive and perpetual QR code society. I therefore call on my colleagues to be on the safe side and to reject this gateway to a Chinese-style social credit system. The choice before us is clear: embracing a future of surveillance and control, or upholding the principles of freedom and autonomy that define our democratic society.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I did not come here today to apologise to you for the conduct of today's absentee, Charles Michel, who is disgraceful not only to Belgium, but also to the European institutions themselves. Somebody else has to do it. For those who are critical of European cooperation and a European Union that is moving towards a centralised unitary state to the detriment of the competences of the Member States, for someone who takes ‘our people first’ as the starting point of his political action, the presidency of Belgium is not good news. After all, Belgium will try as much as possible and as massively as possible to push through the extremist-federalist agenda of the von der Leyen Commission before the elections put an end to this left-liberal and green festival of recent years. The Belgian establishment is not only a blind follower of this agenda, but the Belgian government, like the majority in this European Parliament, is also a raft that in fact does not have a real democratic majority in the Belgian parliament. In order to circumvent a clear right-wing, Flemish-national electoral victory in Flanders, a government has been crafted that is dominated by left-wing parliamentarians who have been elected mainly in the French-speaking part of the country. It is headed by a Flemish prime minister from one of the smallest parties in that coalition. That position makes him a so-called mop of the Walloon Socialist Party. A damned ragNot according to the word of Nigel Farage that he once used here for the image of Herman Van Rompuy, but according to the word of Alexander De Croo literally himself, in an interview, several months prior to the moment when he would assume that status of mop himself. Colleagues, the consequences of these political imbalances do not go unnoticed. Belgium, not according to my figures, but according to the European Commission's Semester assessment, is itself a serious problem. The budget deficit is, with the exception of Slovakia, the worst in the European Union as a whole, both this year and beyond, when the situation is set to deteriorate to around 5%. The global debt ratio risks rising to 107.3% in 2025 and unlike the rest of the European Union, again excluding Slovakia, inflation in Belgium will rise to 4.2% in 2024. The fact that Belgium is in such an exceptional and in fact scandalous situation is less puzzling than it seems. Anyone who dares to look at things can see that all French-speaking institutions, or institutions dominated by French-speaking socialists, are heading for a financial catastrophe in 2024. French-speaking Belgium is therefore no longer able to contribute to the normalisation of the country. On the Flemish side, however, this normalization is considered simply impossible by more and more people and one wants either partial or full autonomy for Flanders. For Belgium, therefore, a penalty bench is more appropriate than today’s chair. a Penalty Bench – after the 2024 elections.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, today we are going through yet another chapter of the commedia dell’arte, referred to in the professional jargon of European Union enthusiasts in this Parliament as the ‘Conference on the Future of Europe’. Our view of this federalist dragon is the following: this so-called Conference on the Future of Europe was a failure. No fewer than 13 Member States have already indicated that they do not want Treaty reform on the basis of the results of this fake conference. They oppose the findings of the carefully selected so-called Citizens’ Panels, which were in no way representative of what the citizens of the Member States really want. Rather, this conference was a federalist piece of comic theatre and was in no way the voice of the European people calling for more European Union. In almost all referenda prior to the Lisbon Treaty, the project of a stronger Union above and beyond the sovereignty of the Member States was rejected. What we need to do is to start again from scratch and negotiate, at Council level and in accordance with the wishes of each Member State, a treaty that re-establishes the long-forgotten subsidiarity. Undoubtedly with extensive opt-out possibilities and a return of competences to the Member States. Only in this way will we save European cooperation, closer to the citizens rather than the totally alien and centralised EU state envisioned by the federalist lobby in this Parliament.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, it is with great sadness and sadness that we learned that Sweden was murdered in the Belgian capital, Brussels, because of their Swedish origin. And it is with great shame that I, as a Belgian citizen, have to point out a failing immigration policy here. Belgium is a country where, if you are allowed to stay, you can stay, and if you are not allowed to stay, too. So a country in which a radical, life-threatening IS fighter whose asylum application was rejected, could then supposedly remain in hiding undisturbed in Belgium, equipped with a home and a registered motor vehicle and ultimately also a weapon of war. A big shame for Belgium and a call here to Europe: Please wake up before this all ends in chaos!

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, when I think about what is happening now with Artsach ... With military power and the threat of – and the memory of – centuries of genocide and ethnic cleansing, let the entire Armenian population in that part of the Caucasus be driven away, and let that happen without much more than a few empty words because of gas supplies. To impose and allow to be imposed the total powerlessness and the total humiliation upon the Christian nation that is Armenia in that part of the world. Looking intently and willingly the other way, although we fear that the two Ottoman autocrats Erdoğan and Aliyev will seek unity to expand their empire in the further arrogant trampling of southern Armenia. When I think of all this, I am ashamed because Turkey's membership of NATO completely blinds us. And every time I hear von der Leyen and the EU elite talking about European values and human rights, I will think of this photo, of von der Leyen with a gas contract. I will be deeply ashamed in the name of Europe of so much hypocrisy.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, we already knew after Brexit that this Commission would not act calmingly with the European factor, but that on the contrary there would be a radicalisation, an EU fanaticism, an EU extremism that had never been seen. And this Commission has again underlined here today that this programme is continuing. You have begun to acquire powers that do not belong to you: education, health – we had already seen that. You have confirmed that the immigration pact is continuing, that is to say, more immigration, that you are also on an enlargement agenda that wants to make the European Union an empire, and with the shaky green-left majority you are continuing this green agenda, which risks becoming a disaster for agriculture, for industry and for the individual transport of citizens, also for the housing prices of citizens who are going to get the environmental conditions all over their neck – I will leave the mess with the money supply and with the money creation aside. This Commission is therefore actually carrying out a degrowth-program following a communist example – the Great Reset, which had already been proclaimed in Davos, will present you here. This Commission must leave as a matter of urgency. There needs to be a less fanatical, less EU-extremist European Union, so I hope it was your farewell speech.

Mr President, I would just like to remind you how cynical this Parliament can be. We had already seen that yesterday, with the installation, after Qatargate, of a ‘Comité de salut public’ created under the impulse of socialists, which is going to monitor the behaviour of MEPs here without proportionality and supplemented by experts. We see that today too. I would like to remind you that instead of respecting the taxpayer, and returning all those British seats to the taxpayer after Brexit, we have tried from the beginning to keep those seats here. And fortunately, the Council - quite rightly, incidentally - rejected transnational lists, because otherwise all those British seats would have stayed here. And I repeat: a lack of respect for taxpayers and a form of cynicism that is actually unacceptable.

Mr President, we are talking about the upcoming meeting of the European Council. I quote from your title: “in the light of recent progress on the conclusion of the Migration Pact”. The use of the term ‘progress’ is, in my opinion and in the opinion of my party, the Vlaams Belang, a higher form of cynicism. In your dream world, this bubble of green-left complacency, you may be thinking of making progress towards your final goal: a heaven of a migration pact that keeps borders open indefinitely to population growth from around the world, while spreading legal and illegal influxes across the continent without distinction and punishing Member States that do not play this game. However, you do not realize that you are no longer speaking on behalf of an ever-increasing group of people from all the Member States who are so thoroughly fed up with this game that hundreds of thousands of them are turning away from the European Parliament because they feel that you are rapidly allowing our continent to sink culturally under migration. In their view, this is not progress, but an unprecedented decline in our history. We are speaking on behalf of this large group and will ask the electorate to pass judgment on this.

Mr President, whether European cooperation was ever originally intended to impose some form of social model on the Member States does not even need to be debated. No, that was not the intention of European cooperation. The intention was to bring more stability and prosperity, and then very reluctantly. It had to be a unity in diversity. Because in that European diversity was precisely the power of what as a whole had produced a superior civilization, with a social and prosperous economy on top of it. At a time when Hungary wants to exclude itself from the rotation system in order to be able to chair the Council, there is an almost neo-communist and centralist arrogance towards a country that was the first to take steps to free itself from the Soviet Union, in which we, as Western Europeans, left all of Eastern Europe out of cowardice after the World War. I am appalled by this proposal.

Mr President, we do not think that the reasons why the European Central Bank wants to introduce this digital euro are part of the various fallacies put forward by the European elite, but part of the further steps that we as citizens have seen our governments take over the past decade towards the absolute control society. Today, this digital currency with a political decision, even more so than before with the euro, becomes a currency that is introduced for political reasons. That this digital currency is needed to stay ahead of the disruptive market forces of Facebook and Mastercard is a fallacy, because that can be curtailed in other ways. It is a fallacy to control the failure of a commercial bank as a result of a banking crisis because it has supervisory and resolution mechanisms in place. The fact that the euro and the digital euro will continue to coexist is a fallacy, because a simple new political decision can put an end to it. And criminals must be dealt with directly by a more efficient government, not through totalitarian super-control of the lives of all citizens. In short, there is much more reason to fear that this new and essentially programmable government-controlled currency poses the risk of controlling not only revenue but also expenditure. Just like a social media account, a political currency like this will be able to limit or cancel your behavior and your opinion through your spending at the touch of a button. The CO2 fines approved here yesterday for naughty citizens will immediately be collected by Timmermans and his successors. Awake citizens who have freedom, la liberté, die Freiheit, the freedom carry in the heart, reject this coin. And I end with this warning from George Orwells Animal Farm: ‘These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.’

Mr President, this annual report on the ECB is one of the many mandatory numbers that are being used in this hemisphere to keep the institutions afloat by handing out a blank cheque with Parliament's approval. For a moment, this report incorporates sentences in which Parliament ‘expresses its concern’, this year more specifically about the historically high inflation, which is pushing so many Europeans into misery. Let's look each other in the eye and see where this inflation comes from. This inflation is the result of a money creation of which we are celebrating the tenth anniversary this year. The euro is an unnatural currency, created for political reasons, with purely political criteria and against the scientific questions of whether a single currency zone is suitable for countries and entities that are so far apart economically. Nevertheless, the European Union's elite, the majority in Parliament, have insisted on being able to enforce greater political unity and to determine the budgetary, economic and even social policies of the Member States. The currency is a strangling instrument of this unitary state. When this unnatural coin began to destabilize, you knocked on Mario Draghi's door to pump money into this system at all costs. Now there is no turning back and you are trying to get a grip on the situation with the increase in interest rates. The citizens of the Union are the victims of this story. Your political dreams of a unified Europe have dragged them into a monetary and economic swamp.

Mr President, if it were not so serious, I could call it ridiculous: the way in which you, ladies and gentlemen of the politically correct majority in the European Parliament, all collectively jump on the scene at every crisis to say that the only solution to the crisis is more power for the European Union. We have actually been seeing this since the beginning of the century. Do we have a banking crisis or a financial crisis? Hopla, the . Do we have a migration crisis? Hopla, the migration pact with the open borders of the European Union. Are we having a corona crisis? Hopla, a unified competence for public health. Even the treaties and agreements no longer count. And always more and more. Never less. Never a return of power to the Member States. It has become a religious dogma in your minds. Even today, in the event of an energy price crisis that you have largely caused by green dogmas and naivety towards Russia itself, that crisis must serve the truly interconnected Energy Single Market. I'll say it again: If your hunger for power were not so dramatic for the freedom of our Member States and the well-being of our citizens, we would call it ridiculous. Stop that.

Mr President, I have heard in recent days that more and more people are supposedly expecting a solution from the European Union. I don't know if the translation will be able to convey this, but in Dutch we have an expression for that: They go to confession to the devil. In this way, we express in our language that the victims are throwing themselves into the arms of the one who caused their problems. A European Union that has caused the inflation explosion itself since the financial crisis with almost doubling the money supply. A European Union that, with a long-standing Green Deal, with the closure of nuclear power plants and the disruption of our energy supply, started the explosion of energy prices itself, long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a fact. A European Union that, with its Reset concepts, its sustainable development and its building back better nonsense, has used the de-industrialisation of our continent and the implosion of small entrepreneurship and of our agriculture. A European Union that, with its forced mass immigration, has disrupted both our European culture and our social system. Please, people, wake up. The European Union is not a solution to our problems. She is one of our biggest problems.

Mr President, we all know that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a safe haven for terrorists. The Iranian regime is using its embassies and international terror groups to undermine our security in the West. We saw this, for example, in the planned attack on political opponents near Paris, organised by the Iranian diplomat Assadollah Assadi. He is currently being held by Belgium, but the Belgian government is now the first Western state to organize an exchange between this convicted terrorist and the innocent Iranian-Swedish professor Djalali through a law and a bilateral treaty. This is Iran's strategy. They hostage dual nationals, such as the professor, to bring about the return of terrorists to Iran. This has been rightly criticised in the United States. However, the EU remains silent for the time being on this Belgian decision, which is a precedent for the EU. For us, this is totally unacceptable.

Mr President, since the withdrawal of the United Kingdom, the cooperation of the European Member States within the European Union has paradoxically turned into a speed race: an insane acceleration of centralisation and the creation, instead of the Member States, of a unitary state or even, in the words of Guy Verhofstadt, a world empire. He forgot that the United States is a gas exporter and, when sanctions were imposed, immediately announced that exports of gas to Europe would increase tenfold this year. The European Union is seizing every crisis, including the COVID-19 crisis and the war in Ukraine, to insidiously reinforce and accelerate this evolution. The Conference on the Future of Europe was a glorified theatre performance and, in fact, a major failure. Few hundred citizens showed up for the conference and were then manipulated and directed by professionals during the meetings towards a list of proposals that are almost a copy of the most far-reaching unifying projects of the united state. The conference then gave the left-liberal and green majority of the European Parliament the opportunity to promote these proposals as the only and irreversible path for cooperation on the European continent. This majority has called itself the ‘pro-European majority’ since yesterday’s failed vote. Those who disagree belong to the ‘anti-European minority’ or, to a lesser extent, to the ‘far right’. The ID Group rejects these so-called results of the conference and remains committed only to a free and negotiated European cooperation in which the Member States and peoples are not deprived of their rights. European standards cannot be imposed on citizens whose Member State has not agreed to them. The emphasis should be on the return of power to the Member States. An amendment of the Treaties is therefore only useful to us if this possibility is provided for. We want to contribute to Europe, but Europe must change and not get worse than it already is.