Speeches

Madam President, the wolf is back and I think this is a debate that must not be conducted ideologically, but in principle very practically and pragmatically. On the one hand, nature conservation has achieved great success, the wolf is back, I myself have a country house in the north of Bohemia, it was the first place where the wolf returned to us after 200 years. I've seen the pack, there's a howl on my phone. It's a beautiful song. I am happy about it and there is an advantage that it is a former military space, so there is no interaction with those small sheep breeders. You go a little further, 50 kilometers, and there you see two wolves massacring 80 sheep overnight for pleasure. And the farmer doesn't have the means to take costly measures, and even the help from the state isn't enough. So I think this is about finding a solution. Just the situation in different regions, in different countries is different and the European Commission should reflect on this and deal with it really on the ground, as required by the circumstances there in the country. We are all dealing with the donkey of the President of the Commission, but there are simply thousands of farmers, small sheep farmers, who are in a much more difficult situation than she is.

Mr President, let us be clear. The directive, as prepared by the rapporteur, will not lead to an improvement in air quality, but only to pressure for a blanket restriction on free economic activity and an increase in the number of actions against Member States. These are already struggling to meet today's limits, which are based on the 2005 WTO recommendations, especially in cities, not to mention the 2021 limits. In order to understand each other, I am not calling for us to do nothing in the matter of air. I am aware of the impact on public health. However, we need to build on real possibilities and, above all, on the availability of the best technologies, which is still limited. As Euro 7 rapporteur, I would like to say that even if we were to follow the strictest possible path, the left, with Javi Lopez at the forefront, will still be little. Are we prepared for the fact that no European city can be reached by the cleanest car? Do we have as robust public transport in all European cities as in the Czech Republic? I don't think so. Keep that in mind for tomorrow's vote.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, today’s vote on nature restoration provides us with a very useful lesson. Those of us who love nature, who want to protect the birds and the bees were very glad that it passed through, but with a very narrow margin. I think it’s obvious that the Green Deal faces its limits. The elections are close and the people are tired. The text which went through the Council and Parliament is more realistic than what was proposed the Commission. I still remember, in the past, the Commission as a guardian of fairness. Today it is trying to lead us, but sometimes it’s taking an almost extreme position. This historic decarbonisation just makes the lives of our people in Europe more expensive. It provides an advantage to China, and globally it does not generate any effect. The EU is travelling around the summits in the global arena, lecturing others, but the others are either smiling into our eyes or doing this in a more capitalistic way, like the United States. We still can change it, but must do something for nature now and locally, here, that we older people would see some result from during our lifetime. Because if you ask people to sacrifice something, they must be offered also some redemption.

Mr President, for colleagues on the left, Viktor Orbán supported this in the Council. The proposal we have on the table is not good and is intrinsically contradictory. Yes, it is good that it can help disappearing birds, pollinators, help retain water in the landscape. On the other hand, it complicates the livelihood of the peasants, we know that. It brutally encroaches on the competences of the Member States and generates uncovered costs. In the Council, some of these shortcomings, such as the frantic power given to NGOs, have been remedied. Thank God for that. But the main mistake was made by the Commission and Frans Timmermans. Where's Frans Timmermans? We – and this House too – have hysterically prioritised decarbonisation, which makes everything locally more expensive but produces no results globally. The heat is still on, and China is generating profits. If we had voted on this proposal two years ago, I bet it would have gone through like a knife with butter. Now we have a divided House, and it's up to us to do it.

Madam President, I was the shadow rapporteur for the opinion on AFIR, or alternative infrastructure, alternative charging, and I will say the following: those of us – and I count on them too – who think that it is not wise to ban internal combustion engines, but to leave it to some market, naturally and logically tend to think that it would be far better to let the market environment and what demand actually is, rather than, in a socialist way, to build something according to different five-year plans, to ban something, to order something. But the reality here is that in this environment and in this venerable institution, the socialist view prevailed, that is, to forbid, to command. So if we want to ban people from running those internal combustion engines – and I say again, I disagree with that – then, of course, we also have to offer them something so that they can drive and so that they can charge. From this point of view, of course, the AFIR legislation is of great importance. That's why I took part in the negotiations. Even here, I have to say that it is far from over and enthusiastically agree with it. Such a situation is certainly not there simply because we, our factions, would prefer a much broader degree of technological neutrality. Here again, we prefer electromobility dominantly, so we are actually putting European industry at risk so that China simply overwhelms us here. I think that's a huge mistake. But there is no doubt that if people drive electric cars, they must also have a place to charge, and if we forbid and order them to do so, we must also offer them an alternative.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, this has been said many times, but it needs to be repeated over and over again. Ukraine is fighting for us. And because she fights for us in her brave fight, it is our duty to help her in this struggle, to help her militarily, economically, politically and morally. Important meetings of both the European Council and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are approaching, and Ukraine also needs a future perspective. It needs not only the weapons that we are sending it right, not only the economic help that we are giving it, but also the prospect that it will be with us both in the European Union and in the North Atlantic Alliance. And let us think about it when we meet on the eve of the holidays, and let us support Ukraine in this sense.

Mr President, I am still from the old traditional capitalist school. I think the business's job is to generate profit and not to prove to the last detail how it was achieved, or to show the loyalty of the local government and its dominant ideology. There is a lot of talk about China, but we are certainly not regulating ourselves for a successful competitiveness with China. Concept due diligence as this report conceives it, it is, in my view, an edge, and indirectly, but all the more intensely, it will hit especially small and medium-sized enterprises, companies that are always here in unison and often hypocritically calling for the backbone of the European economy. Let us now agree that we are serious about them and reject this silly and dangerous message.

Mr President, dear friends, China is an emerging superpower and aspiring to be the global number one. Therefore, we definitely are in a situation of need of a proper and coherent strategy. But this should not be done according to lines which we have seen the last week when President Macron went to China to pursue the economic interest of his own country and, as a reward to his host, offered a vision of European equidistance to the United States and China at the same time. He did even worse in the name of the EU. He was speaking about the EU strategic autonomy, but offered a strategic ambiguity instead. And he did this in a situation when we terribly need a strong NATO and the cooperation of the US in the Ukraine. Next time we must do much better.

... is that the situation has changed, that the price of the electricity is three times higher than when we have concluded the agreement here last summer. That is simply the matter of true. Secondly, yes, I have to pay three times more than a year ago. (Off-mic comments in the Chamber) That’s, you know, my token of appreciation to Peter. I said, you know, that you approach this as a really honest broker, in the best Bismarckian tradition. Yeah, but simply, we had a full Wenceslas Square yesterday, very angry people, so it’s political.

Mr President, I would like to thank Peter Liese, who was the rapporteur for the most important dossier. . Thanks to this, we have managed to provide at least relief for the heating plants so that the central heat supply does not break down. Emergency brakes were also put in place to prevent further excessive increases in the price of allowances. But that's where the beauty ends. Unfortunately, the circumstances have further deteriorated and we as a whole in the ECR group may not be able to support the package. Why? Electricity prices are now tripling. People are getting poor, they don't have heating, I'm not going to show any yellow vests here, but all you have to do is watch TV. Yesterday, people completely filled Wenceslas Square in Prague. So it's a problem, a political problem. Second, yes, we say Putin is to blame. It's Putin's fault, but it's also ours. We cannot use Putin as an alibi for everything, the reality is that the allowance price is one hundred euros per tonne, which is five times the situation two years ago. Third, qualified estimates say that electricity consumption will double within ten to fifteen years. We'll have to import it, but we don't have a place to go. We don't have where, because Germany is shutting down the last nuclear power plants. We will build new ones, but within ten to fifteen years, with the support of this House, we have no chance of building them. So, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin said: ‘Soviet power plus electrification equals communism.’ We are working on electrification, we are handing over power to Brussels here, so I pray that the result will be better than it was then. (The speaker agreed to respond to the speech by raising a blue card.)

Mr President, well, if you know, we will vote tomorrow on the revision of the Regulation on fluorinated greenhouse gases, also known as ‘F—gases’, which belongs among the greenhouse gases. Therefore, like CO2, they have come under the Commission’s scrutiny. It is, of course, right to limit the use of F—gases, because they have a high global warming potential, even greater than CO2 itself. At the same time, it should be done wisely and definitely not by shooting ourselves in our own foot. Besides their other applications, F—gases are used in heat pumps, which become one of the most effective tools to save energy and to cut off from Russian gas. That is why more and more households are installing them and public demand is increasing. I want to thank Bas Eickhout for his rapporteurship, which he carried out in an open—minded and constructive way. I want to thank him, for example, for finding a solution regarding the usage of F—gases for the cooling of nuclear power plants. On the other hand, some crucial elements are still missing in the final compromise. The phase-out of the F—gases in the heat pumps is, in my opinion, too fast for us to be able to meet the requirements. Therefore, I want to recommend that we vote for some amendments.

Mr President, yes, we terribly need a more competitive economy and to generate more jobs in Europe now. But we are taking the wrong way. A typical example is the monopoly in electromobility production, which this Commission is trying to promote. We are just shooting into our leg and we are inviting China to overcome us, instead of keeping our competitive advantage in combustion engines alive. We need to change course. We need less green ideology and more capitalist pragmatism. For innovation, we need fewer bureaucrats and more venture funds. We need less regulation and more liberty. We do not need bans, command economies or long—term planning. We need the freedom of choice and for competition inside Europe to succeed globally.

Mr President, we are piling up the error after the error. Four years after the Green Deal, the Commission is coming up with an industrial plan. You should have come four years ago, hand in hand with that. That's how it is with the industry here. Second of all. We prepared CBAM without consulting America, and now we are surprised that we have an IRU on the table. Instead of putting it together in advance. Now what are we suggesting? Dodge yourself to death? We don't have that. Debt to death? We don't have that. Or a trade war with the United States? Which means decapitating with our main partner at a time when we need him in the face of Chinese and Russian aggression. Or what? Heads together, tie things forward, and don't do it this late, when there's either war or misery or both.

No, no, no, we ask for the inclusion of the synthetic fuels and others and it was not accepted, only in the recital and in the recital it’s not legally binding, it’s just a proclamation to appease one party in the German coalition. But we wanted the inclusion of the technological neutrality, including the synthetic force, into the legislation, it was not accepted and then we had a promise that Euro 7 would be light in exchange and it is hard.

Madam President, what we have before us here is probably one of the stupidest solutions that we have discussed during this period. Nothing against electric cars. In cities, it makes sense. They are expensive, but the golden youth love them. Accelerate like a cheetah. But betting on one solution creates a monopoly. And monopoly always goes against prosperity and freedom. We will impoverish the middle class, we will multiply the ranks of the unemployed, we will restrict human freedom, and we will record China, which is far beyond this, in batteries and software. After all, there is a problem to connect to the internet in Bavaria on the highway. I will therefore also vote against it in the hope that we will still give a chance to technological neutrality, that we will still give a chance to develop synthetic fuels and thus give a chance to competition that will only guarantee innovation and preserve human freedom. (The speaker agreed to respond to the speech by lifting the blue card).

Mr President, well, the report which we are discussing today contains a lot of interesting recommendations but has one problem: it is a long list of the various recommendation ideas, including those which we will be discussing years ahead, like QMV reform, and meanwhile there is a war in the Ukraine, where we rightly support the Ukraine against this terrible Russian aggression but our deliveries are deadly slow. The storages are empty and we need to do much more and much faster. And therefore, instead of producing another hundreds of thousands of papers, we should do one thing: the same what FDR did for Churchill, this lend and lease programme to allocate EUR 50 billion into debt and to start delivering armaments of Ukraine so that they would be able to win. But it requires the deeds, not the words. This is our problem, we have to work on the deeds.

Madam President, for several years, we have been persuading the United States to make a Green Deal, too. They finally did it, and we don't like it, because they did it their own way, more capitalist, with tax deductions that lower the price, not with regulations and orders that raise the price, as is happening here. In the Czech Republic we call it: When you walk around with a jug for water for a long time, your ear snaps off. Of course, we don't like it because it violates WTO rules, but when we point out here for years that the CBAM we're planning here is also violating WTO rules, and when we point out that Americans don't like it, here's the result. Again in the Czech Republic we say: When you call out to the forest, you call out from the forest. So yes, let's prevent trade wars that no one can profit from, but we must start with ourselves first.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, surely we all can agree that we want a long-term and peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. That is beyond dispute. I guess we all want world peace and nice weather as well. I don’t want to mock it; of course, we have to do everything we can. It is clear that Israel, as the only long-term democratic, predominantly Jewish state in the Middle East, must be given security guarantees that are credible to the Israeli public. The EU’s credibility in this matter is diminished by the fact that it repeatedly ties itself to various dubious programmes that support Palestinian radicals. This reduces its own credibility in the eyes of both partners and further deepens the rift. These days, it is more than appropriate to recall that the EU must first and foremost control its hands and pockets. That’s the way we should start.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, COP 15 in Montreal is an important negotiation. We all want to protect nature and biodiversity. We all care about the future of forests, clean water and soil protection. There is only one planet, and the world must work together on this, and Europe must lead by example. But I warn the European Union not to repeat the mistake it made at COP 27. Please, let us not outwardly represent as binding targets those that we have not yet approved at home. Many areas, such as land use or spatial planning, are still the exclusive competence of the Member States. The same goes for their funding. So far, the European Commission has presented only a proposal, only a plan and nothing more. Therefore, accepting any commitments on behalf of the European Union is premature, in this sense unreasonable and legally and legally unacceptable.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, yes, a lot of good has been said here. The Czech Presidency is working day and night, the third Extraordinary Energy Council, so that there is at least some short relief. Okay, the European Commission is supporting the interconnectors, but the main problem is the gas price here and now. And of course, yes, you've come up with the ceiling, finally, since we've been calling for it for months. But the ceiling is still five and a half times higher than the price two years ago, and five times higher than today's price in the United States. So the solution is long-term gas contracts, which, unfortunately, some states reject because they do not want a cheap gas price. Just with America, with Qatar, with Azerbaijan, not with Russia, of course. That would be the solution, because investors will be sure at the moment. China has signed a 27-year contract with Qatar, so why don't we do the same? If we don't, the big energy-intensive companies will all move to China or America. And we don't want that.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve told this over and over again. We can’t fight two wars, advance against Putin and carbon, it’s above our weight. Yes, we must contain Putin at any price. Yes, we must support Ukraine. Yes, we must be independent of Russia supplies. Yes, we are capping the prices and introducing the windfall tax. But it’s not enough to keep social stability and prices under control. Most liberal democracies is the home and friendly cooperation inside the EU are in danger. Therefore, we should slow down our radical decarbonisation effort by mitigating the ETS system, by allowing LNG long-term contracts, by capping the energy prices, the gas from the electricity. And finally, also by rehabilitating fully the nuclear energy as the stable source of baseload. This is the way to cheaper ... (the President cut off the speaker)

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, we are in a situation where the issue of food security is more topical than ever. The growing world population, the war in Ukraine, is bringing about a sharp rise in the prices of food, gas, and thus fertilizers. The price of gas is 40 % of the variable cost of production of fertilizers. We import 60% of industrial fertilizers into Europe from Russia and Belarus. Our further dependence on Russia threatens our existence. With the war in Ukraine, the price of fertilisers increased and their imports decreased. The European Union must act swiftly on this issue, firstly by rejecting or at least postponing the revision of the pesticides regulation and by supporting research on biopesticides. Second, we will cast aside prejudice and urgently allow the use of new genomic techniques in agriculture, as the rest of the world normally does. Thirdly and finally, we will encourage the use of alternative fertilisation options, in particular composted sewage sludge. Farmers are trying to reduce chemical pollution of the soil. No one wants to have polluted, unhealthy soil, but at the same time they need suitable alternatives. If there are no nutrients and minerals in the field, we will not have enough agricultural crops with sufficient yield and nutritional value. Our food security and thus our existence will be threatened. There's no way we're gonna let that happen.

Mr President, yes, Russian propaganda is in full swing. And the more numerous Putin's fifth column, the stronger it is. We must defend ourselves, but the solution cannot be just bans and our crying. We must also touch our consciences. The list of cronies here goes across from left to right. Yes, who got us more into Putin's noose? Angela Merkel and her Energiewende, Gerhard Schröder, Dutch politicians and their Gazprom or Matteo Salvini, Madame Le Pen and others who are looking for funding and support there? I think, unfortunately, that it goes across here and that until we reach into our consciences, until we stop chasing the Conservatives into Russia's arms with this dominance of progressiveism, then we will only be stronger and more able to defend ourselves against propaganda.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, today I will be positive because we have a quality resolution ahead of us, which contains all important elements – our reminders that Russia bears the full responsibility for the war, our reiteration of the full support for Ukraine, including our call to increase the massive military assistance, and also calling to explore the possibility for lend-lease military assistance; something what I have already proposed during the last plenary. Also, we are rightly condemning the so-called referenda to annex the four Ukrainian regions as illegal and illegitimate. And, last but not least, we are also condemning the recent Russian threats to use nuclear weapons as irresponsible and dangerous, and calling that we would not be deterred in our further assistance to Ukraine and self-defence. That’s all good. Maybe one thing is missing here, and that’s to designate that threatening the use of nuclear force should be labelled or designed as a threat against peace and humanity. So let’s work on that because it’s unprecedented rhetoric by Putin.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen. I just read this, today’s leaked Commission proposal. It’s a late step in the right direction, but it does not fix the whole problem of gas prices. And mostly it deals only with the consequences, not with the root causes of the problem. And the root causes are in the negative synergy of Putin’s war, of the German Energiewende, which produce this instabilities, and the radicality of the EU climate law. Simply speaking, we are trying to fight more wars, full-scale wars at once. This is something what even the United States, much more powerful than us, admits is beyond their strength. So this is our mistake. We should be selective, we should fight Putin first in those circumstances, and then we can go back to climate if we would have some partner in the global world.