Speeches

Madam President, Mrs O'Reilly, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, Madam Ombudsman, first of all, thank you and congratulations for your work. Since you headed this institution, you have fought for transparency and against cases of maladministration in Brussels. You have dared to criticise the Commission's purchases of 1.5 million defective masks and, above all, the negotiation by SMS of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. You also revealed that revolving doors are not controlled within the Commission. In 2019, out of 1,000 requests for officials to move to the private sector, the European executive blocked only six. According to LinkedIn, more than 250 former Commission employees work for Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook or Apple. How many former commissioners have become lobbyists? Thank you for asking us about the opacity of tobacco industry lobbying. We need ethics, trust and honor. Madam, I also congratulate you on having opened an investigation last Monday into the free flights that were allegedly granted by Qatar Airways to a Director-General of the Commission. I regret only one thing, that your recommendations are often ignored by the Brussels Commission.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, next year Paris will ban diesel. Rouen, Lyon, Strasbourg will follow. The purchase price of cars is skyrocketing, but Macron’s allies also want to exclude French people who drive petrol cars. Why this relentlessness, when these same people go to do yoga in Bali by plane or get foamed in Davos by private jet? You want to punish a whole generation of drivers with spurious arguments and batons: radars every 20 metres, technical checks every two days, exclusion stickers, one litre of petrol at EUR 3. French people who get up early need their car to go to work, to pick up their children, to go shopping, to avoid unsafe and crowded public transport. This society of surveillance and obedience is not the Europe I love. We must stop with the politics of fear, guilt and punishment imposed by your 2030 Agenda. The ‘all-electric’ is what we do not want. This is an excuse for colonialists, because the electric car does not pollute here, but in Africa, in the cobalt mines, far from your lofts and second homes. With you, for a part of the population, it is the cold shower and the candle while eating pizzas with domestic crickets.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, some Members sell Europe with bags of tickets, others with overpaid conferences: It is as old as the world. How can we explain that Barroso and Monti, two former members of the European Commission, sell conferences for more than €100,000? The Qatar case is the tree that hides the McKinsey scandal forest from Pfizer, and you know that. So, to wash whiter than white, you are announcing today the creation of an independent ethics body. Who are we kidding? Let the von der Leyen Commission clean up the house and lead by example. Madam, SMS are official documents of the European Union. I am a member of the special committee on the COVID-19 pandemic, and we are not even done getting Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, to talk to us ten minutes remotely. We want him to explain his text messages with Ms von der Leyen and his greyed-out contract of 2.4 billion doses. Together with my colleagues, we learn from the press that Pfizer-BioNTech is renegotiating a delivery of 500 million doses until 2024, with hidden prices and against the advice of Member States that want to stop the fees. In total, the Commission has concluded €71 billion worth of vaccine contracts that do not prevent the transmission or catching of COVID-19. With, as a bonus, a policy of pro-Pfizer thinking, imposed within digital platforms through a code of conduct excluding the divergent opinions of doctors and scientists. And you are talking here about ethics and independence? If you want the independence of this ethics committee, appoint a Member from our political group, for example an RN Member, as its head.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, after the billions in health and armaments, Brussels ventures into the regulation of the 2024 European elections, even into our villages. You are all terrorised by democracy, terrorised by the idea of reliving the Trump wave, terrorised by Brexit, terrorised by freedom of expression. Your sponsors subsidise and control the press, TV channels attack your propaganda 24 hours a day, but the flame of freedom has taken refuge on social media and alternative media. We are obviously in favour of the transparency of political advertising, such as the transparency of SMS messages between Bourla and Ursula, the transparency of Pfizer vaccine purchase agreements, and the transparency of NGO lobbies. Yes, let the Commission clarify whether the Orgenesis laboratory, where Ursula’s husband is medical director, receives EU funds, and why the Commission is still buying half a billion Pfizer doses until 2024 at hidden prices! No one is fooled. It is not the transparency of political party advertisements that is targeted, but your fear of democracy, of the outcome of the ballot box.

Mr President, Commissioner, the shortage of medicines in France has become staggering and I am furious, furious, to learn that six-year-old Elhana died in the emergency room in Montauban. Her father told the press that in 2023, losing a child to an antibiotic is not acceptable. Indeed, this is not acceptable. What are Big Pharma doing that spends their time offshoring, speculating? And now you'd have to dice to get paracetamol? It is true that they found a good vein: SMS negotiation of billions of doses of COVID vaccines. In France, in 2023, there are no more hospitals, no more carers, no more medicines. This is the 30-year record of Maastricht, with the complicity of our governments, which are following McKinsey’s advice. How to explain that for months, pharmacists have struggled to obtain basic drugs such as antibiotics or pediatric paracetamol? For the European Commission, Europe will take care of it as with the purchase of millions of doses of COVID vaccines that no one wants anymore. Furious to see that at the same time thousands of expired COVID vaccines have to be discarded. There's an emergency. No parent can accept this shortage. There will be accountability.

Mr President, today you want to celebrate 30 years of the Single Market? Yes, Maastricht has a balance sheet, you have a balance sheet. Thirty years after Maastricht, what has become of European companies? Thirty years of relocations to Asia or Eastern Europe, thirty years of subsidies from our competitors in Europe, the famous Spanish TGVs, Renault and Airbus headquarters in the Netherlands, thirty years of importing cheap labour, thirty years of destruction of our champions Alstom, Nokia, Ariane and Pechiney. Your recipes are out of date. You are the unfair tax competition of Ireland and the Netherlands. Green Puritanism is you too, with the punishment of taxes, the closure of our nuclear power plant, the rise in energy prices to kill our industry. With you, France will remain a digital dwarf and an industrial "Jurassic Park", a HLM country without factories and with unbalanced people in freedom. Emmanuel Macron will just have to turn a blind eye when he comes out. Thirty years ago, I was 20 years old and I even believed in this Europe. We had medicines, satellite launchers, power plants that worked, heating in schools, cheap petrol. Now you have to wait a year to get your car, and we lived through a period when we were even safer to find oil or mustard in the supermarket. In 1993, France had a trade surplus of around EUR 13 billion. In 2022, its trade deficit is EUR 160 billion. It is high time to react. Our continent cannot be absent from the fight for the digital future, nor suffer from culpable shortages such as the production of medicines or chips. For the past four years, Europe's technological sovereignty has been further eroded. Look at Singapore, look even at US President Joe Biden, who is 80 years old and can no longer walk: He himself understood that the United States had to come first, with the anti-inflation plan.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, while President Macron at the APEC forum asks us which side we are on – China or the USA – and states that we need a single world order, or even when the G20 announces the strengthening of global health governance with the lead role of the WHO, Europe is dying under the Brussels bureaucracy. France, on the other hand, is registering deaths in its emergencies for failure to take care. Today, you should not get sick because there are no more hospital beds. Do you have cancer? It will be necessary to wait until places are freed up or you have a friend well placed in a hospital. Private jet forums will never have these problems. In France, we would have half as many scanners per capita as Greece or Denmark. Our French hospitals lack nurses and scanners. We see the same shortcomings with this 2017 regulation, which established a new framework for in vitro diagnostic medical devices, such as HIV, Covid or pregnancy tests. We are talking about medical devices that hospitals in the European Union can keep, but Macron’s France closed 4,400 hospital beds and suspended 15,000 healthcare workers during the Covid crisis. Instead of improving, patient care has deteriorated in Europe and France. In Poissy, this summer, a woman died after 28 hours spent in the emergency room, on a stretcher. We therefore have hospitals that are no longer able to obtain medical devices, European companies that are drowning in bureaucracy and that have to stop producing products that have always been used. In all areas, the Commission is setting up a system of private companies responsible for certifying products. A market of €140 billion in 2022. But let's go back to our subject with concrete examples. How can it be explained that the German private certifier TÜV Rheinland can still practise when he was involved in the PIP breast prosthesis case? TÜV certified these prostheses before they were marketed, then carried out thirteen inspections in thirteen years without ever noticing anything. Certify everything, but check nothing. 400,000 victims including 30,000 in France. Ten years of waiting and legal struggle. For Covid vaccines, we are not talking about 1,000 deaths in 30 years, but 11,000 in one year, in Europe, according to the latest EMA figures. Other pharmaceutical scandals: Pfizer was sentenced to $2.3 billion in 2009 for submitting false statements to authorities for the anti-inflammatory Bextra; Johnson & Johnson, at $775 million in 2019 for minimizing the risk of life-threatening complications due to its Xarelto anticoagulant. Private jet forums forget this sad reality. The Bali G20 statement posted on the White House website clearly has the answers to your questions.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, the European Union claims that combating violence against women and sexual violence is one of its priorities. But it is with seriousness that we discover cases of sexual assault that go unnoticed within the European institutions or large companies. At a time when the European Union is supporting Iranian women, at a time when the fight against sexual violence is at the heart of our parliamentary debates, it is unacceptable to discover in the press, years later, that a young woman has been raped by her superior in the Commission’s offices. She received no support either from her department or from the institution. The aggressor was not given a prison sentence and continued to receive his salary from the Commission. We therefore ask you to add the following debate: “Combating violence against women – strong and immediate measures to condemn perpetrators and support victims”. Ladies and gentlemen, we would like your support for this initiative, at the same time as we learn with astonishment of the horror suffered by 12-year-old Lola. Whatever our differences, we must fight this laxity together to avoid such situations.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, the future with you is ‘pandemic’ and ‘vaccine’. You repeat it seven times: ‘vaccine’, ‘vaccine’, ‘vaccine’, ‘vaccine’, ‘vaccine’... and ‘vaccination’. I had prepared a technical intervention based on your annexes, but since you never answer the questions, I will speak for our fellow citizens, many of whom criticise the action of this deaf and authoritarian Commission, which spends its time punishing the Member States that come out of the nails – from its nails. We all know here that your roadmaps, your small communications to the 27 Member States, you take them from Pfizer BioNTech and from the foundation of Bill and Melinda Gates. Just see the award given last week to European Commission President von der Leyen by Bill Gates for her good and loyal service. A year ago, it was this same president who presented the award for best business leader to Mr Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, who negotiated via SMS and obtained the biggest purchase contract – 2.4 billion doses – through the European Commission. With a unit price of the dose between 15 and 20 euros, we reach peaks! Even our Court of Auditors is critical in its latest report. Therefore, I have no questions to ask you since you do not decide anything. But did you see that your mentor, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, said that there is no longer a pandemic, no more COVID-19? How are you going to do it? Are you going to sue him for misinformation? How are you going to censor him? Moreover, how is Mr Barroso, this former President of the Commission, now at the head of GAVI, this global vaccine organisation partner of COVAX and having Bill and Melinda Gates as sponsors? Who will replace him at the end of the year? Which other member of the European Commission is planned?

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, dear rapporteurs, Commissioner, finally, after more than a decade, we are getting a universal charger for small electronic devices in Europe! Europe is still lagging behind when it comes to defending or protecting its citizens from digital giants. We see this every day, as with the transfer of our personal data to the United States announced in March 2022 by Ms Von der Leyen and Joe Biden, or with this new European health data space managed by Microsoft Azure, this famous ‘data hub’ that Anticor had denounced by referring it to the national financial prosecutor’s office because the French government had chosen it without having put it in competition with European solutions. But let's go back to that detail: chargers. Indeed, it is ridiculous that consumers have to fend for themselves with all kinds of different charger cables. And I am sure that everyone here was once unable to charge their mobile phone because the right charging cable was simply not available. That this situation could have persisted for such a long time is unacceptable. The binding obligation for manufacturers to offer a universal charger system is therefore a welcome development, albeit one that has been awaited for too long. In 2009, the European Commissioner for Industry had already asked manufacturers to agree on a common standard for smartphones; It took thirteen years. Members of the European Parliament have been demanding decisive action from the Commission for more than a decade; Why did it take so long? Were the exchange currencies not large enough? Undoubtedly, the Commission was aiming at self-regulation, and during this time the industry will have continued to drag its feet. This is another example of the failure of the dominant liberal mantra, which inspired the Commission’s naive belief, with this so-called ‘self-regulation’. In particular, Apple alone has blocked efforts to impose legally binding measures for more than a decade; This was confirmed after the publications under the European Freedom of Information Act. This shows once again the immense power of foreign lobbying – in this case the US – over the decision-making process in Europe. And it works: Amazon has just landed the digital euro market. This is not the first time we have seen this phenomenon; it is part of a wider scheme. We believe that the market regulates itself, to conclude decades later that this is not the case. I recall that earlier this year we approved the DMA: again, we have allowed the GAFAMs to claim far too much power over our countries and our citizens. Let this serve as a lesson for the future: Instead of the typical wait-and-see attitude or complicit naivety, we need to act decisively against large foreign companies – if necessary.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, in the report on women’s poverty in Europe, which we support, it is pointed out that the worsening social and economic situation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has increased all forms of abuse and violence against women. That is why I am going to tell you about more than 15 000 healthcare workers suspended in France, the majority of whom are women, who have been without pay for almost a year. I met them and saw this distress closely. Adulated during the first wave of COVID, they have become invisible, even to be eliminated since an infamous decree of Macron. These nurses, nursing assistants, firefighters and doctors were therefore suspended because they did not want to be injected with a product in the experimental phase. It’s curious, isn’t it? No one wants to address this issue. They have been at the front, know vaccines better than anyone, but their consent, which had to be free and informed, is denigrated or even despised. Since the Brussels Commission wants to lead this COVID crisis, let it open its eyes and condemn Macron’s infamous regime to immediately reinstate all those suspended. For our humanistic values, for our honor.

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, decades of laxity have made Europe a digital colony of the American Big Techs, the GAFAMs. The Digital Markets Act, the DMA, is therefore an attempt to reverse the situation. President Macron is self-congratulating on this legislation. However, it is despite the position of the French Presidency, and not because of it, that the DMA still contains useful provisions. Due to pressure from the French Presidency of the Council, the maximum fine for an infringement has been halved. Similarly, the dismantling of GAFAMs that break the rules has been made more difficult. Surprisingly, the Council did not see much value in the interoperability of messaging services. Opening WhatsApp to alternative services would benefit millions of citizens. However, it was only reluctantly accepted. I therefore congratulate the rapporteur, Andreas Schwab, on his success in limiting the damage. I am pleased that my group's proposal to protect whistleblowers is part of the DMA. I would like to thank the rapporteur, my colleagues and the staff concerned for this enormous work. DMA is necessary but not sufficient. It is a beginning but not an end. This legislative measure will not in itself create digital jobs in Europe, nor will it create digital champions, nor will it create Europe’s digital sovereignty. We should massively support European digital companies and invest in digital jobs in Europe, as in the past, with European cooperation initiatives and investments such as Airbus. After decades of laxity, we have one last chance to take the initiative. Our group will support this report.

Madam President, I want to come back to two important votes today. Erasmus, of course, I am in favour. Young people meet and discover Europe, its landscapes, its castles, its peoples. And sometimes the story ends well with couples forming. But at the moment, Brussels is organising a global caravan: Since 2004, more than 100,000 Turks have done Erasmus in Europe and we send our students to Nigeria. It costs €26 billion, and what is the project? That is why I abstained on this vote. As for the second vote on the health pass, I obviously voted against it. The QR code for everyone? No thanks. The Brussels Commission ignored the 400 000 Europeans who had spoken out against it and here in the European Parliament the majority ignored them today. But the fight continues. Why this insistence on injecting six-month-old babies with a COVID vaccine that does not work? As long as there are 1.3 million side effects listed by the EMA, do not put our children, teenagers, students at risk.

Madam President, tomorrow will be put to the vote without debate, without impact assessment, without scientific results, a regulation to extend the use of the EU Digital COVID Certificate until June 2023. Are you aware of the results of the public consultation on this extension proposal organised by the Commission between 3 February and 8 April this year? More than 385,000 contributions have been submitted by European citizens. It is apparent from this massive participation that an overwhelming majority opposes this extension of the QR code. Thanks to a letter mysteriously kept confidential so far, you will be able to discover that the Commission is simply dismissing the results of this consultation. Why organise a public consultation if the Commission decides not to take it into account? I have referred the matter to the European Ombudsman and the Identity and Democracy Group has tabled amendments to delete this unjustified proposal. This highly undemocratic attitude of the Commission should not be endorsed by the European Parliament. This proposal should even be removed from the agenda. In any case, for our freedoms, we will vote against.

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, when I asked your services two years ago, the Commission admitted that it had no idea that European companies were able to win public contracts in the United States or China. Today, you announce that Brussels will demand reciprocity and open public procurement in non-European countries. Congratulations! It is not too early, and we will vote for it. But how can we explain to the French and Europeans that last month the Commission signed a contract with an English company, British Telecom, to manage secret communications between Member States for more than EUR 1 billion? How to explain that Brussels hires the American consulting firm McKinsey without checking whether this firm pays taxes in France or in Europe? How can the European agency SRB, which manages the bankruptcies of European banks in Brussels, choose the American firm BlackRock for advice via a framework contract worth EUR 30 million? Finally, IBM is the leader of the €140 million project that manages our Schengen data, via a €30 million framework contract. We are talking here, however, about regal functions. Cooperation in Europe will only be successful if it is based on the priority for all Europeans.

Madam President, Commissioner, the extension of the health pass, which was originally scheduled for voting tomorrow, will finally be voted on 23 June. Providing evidence of COVID-19 vaccination, test results or recovery in order to be able to continue moving or working was an exceptional device, which was due to end on 30 June 2022. However, the Commission wants to extend it until 30 June 2023, when the pandemic risks and urgency are now clearly debatable. In addition, vaccination does not prevent infection or transmission. In February, a one-month public consultation of the Commission was launched. More than 385,000 people spoke: they are mostly against the extension of this QR code. Why does the Commission, so quick to communicate on the Conference on the Future of Europe, which is based on the opinion of panels of 200 citizens, not take into account the opinion of more than 385 000 Europeans who say no to the QR code? How do you deal with this public consultation? In view of this denial of democracy, where the parliamentary debate has been abolished, and in view of the ignorance of this public consultation, I refer the matter to the European Ombudsman.

Madam President, I have a minute to talk about billions of euros thrown out of Brussels' windows. That's expensive the second! Here everyone welcomes the good management of the Commission and its agencies. The European Medicines Agency has a budget of 370 million euros, and 84% of its revenue comes from Big Pharma, should we congratulate it? The Commission has made its own purchase of vaccines and has reserved 4 billion doses of COVID vaccines via SMS. Today, doses awaiting injection would amount to 2 billion. How many of them are already out of date? These doses would be mostly Pfizer doses. This waste is at least 240 million doses. This waste is 77% increase in Pfizer's revenue. Stocks are exploding: 12 billion were manufactured in 2021 and are expected to double for 2022. Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland are alerting to these forced over-orders and want to suspend these Commission orders. When is the end of this gibberish on the backs of European taxpayers? When will an audit of these Commission orders take place? When will a conflict of interest investigation take place?

Madam President, Mr High Representative, ladies and gentlemen, today we are discussing the situation of women in Afghanistan, of those women and children who are living hell in their homes. Afghanistan, with its huge and arid mountains, with its men piercing in turban and with its infinite poppy fields. We grew up or aged with Afghanistan at war, with the USSR, with Bernard Kouchner, with Commander Massoud and the Taliban on television and then, this summer, with the Americans who fled this land of war overnight. This sudden return to the customs of another time reminds us of our inability to implement women’s rights in distant societies where many fundamentally reject our way of life. What have the Americans done there all these years? Did they really believe that by changing the regime, they could change the whole of Afghan society? They have left Afghanistan in ruins. They left this country in the hands of the Taliban. "When the houses were closed from the inside, American soldiers beat them with rams, forcibly removed the veil of women," Emmanuel Razavi, a senior reporter, wrote this summer. So I am thinking of all those Afghan women who ultimately pay our arrogance to believe that we can impose our way of life on the entire planet. This is our failure at all. $2 trillion has been invested in Afghanistan by the United States over the past 20 years, including $500 billion to pay interest on the debt. France lost 90 men and 700 wounded. Who knows if another €1 trillion could change this country? Who knows if 1,000 more amputees could change this country? I see colleagues organizing a flashmob tomorrow in solidarity with these Afghan women. Do you really think a flashmob will change this country? The urgency is to manage these millions of refugees who arrive here in Europe, especially with these men who come with their customs of another century and who try to impose it on our daughters, our sisters, our mothers, and even on these Afghan refugee women. I will end with this fact various atrocious November 2021, an Afghan migrant... (The President withdrew the floor from the speaker.)

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, while all our eyes are rightfully on Ukraine, another European country continues to suffer martyrdom, far from the cameras and diplomatic turmoil, unfortunately. This country is Armenia, this people is the Armenian people, cruelly let go by all in autumn 2020. Armenia continues to suffer today. In Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed territory with Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani troops are destroying the Armenian cultural heritage of that region, with the aim of driving the Armenian population away from that territory. Until some time ago, I was in Yerevan and I was able to see the suffering of the Armenian people in the face of this ongoing war. We were justifiably moved by the destruction of the Timbuktu mausoleums by the Islamic State. But who cares about the cultural cleansing that threatens the borders of the European continent? Monasteries, churches or tombstones, 1,500 Armenian cultural monuments are threatened with destruction. These acts have already taken place in the past in Nakhchivan, where in 2006 Azerbaijan razed the necropolis of the ancient Armenian city of Juba. These acts threaten to be repeated today, when it seems that Azerbaijan has just set up a working group whose activities will consist in erasing Armenian ‘fictional inscriptions’ from religious or historical monuments in Nagorno-Karabakh. If all the destruction of cultural heritage is to be blamed, wherever it takes place, all over the world, this threat forces us particularly towards this brotherly, Christian and European people.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Madam President of the Commission, first of all I regret the absence of President von der Leyen. But I am happy to be able to pass on to you, from my fellow French citizens, questions about the transparency, or rather the opacity, that surrounds your actions. COVID-19 has created a non-rights universe under the guise of emergency. Transparency, especially when it comes to the health of our children, is fundamental. And so far, it cannot be said that this is the virtue of the Commission. Billions of euros for billions of doses of vaccines ordered from “Big Pharma” while they are still in the clinical study stage and their effectiveness is being questioned. The scandal of the purchase of the medicine remdesivir – which I do not forget – by your Commission should have alerted you. EUR 1 billion for the Gilead laboratory, for 500 000 doses of this treatment, while at the same time negative results were published for it. In your global vaccination strategy, you sent out discarded or expired AstraZeneca vaccines, thousands of doses of which had to be destroyed by Nigeria. Will you shed all the light on these failures? Why are entire pages of these vaccine purchase agreements hidden? Those grey clauses relate in particular to the absence of liability of the labs in the event of undesirable side effects. Why such disclaimers? Why did you hide the price of the doses? Who will pay for the unwanted side effects? Why does the European Commission insist on not sending the European Ombudsman the SMS exchanges between the CEO of Pfizer and the President of the European Commission? To President von der Leyen, who is absent: do not ask Member States today to think about a vaccination obligation, when we are unable to answer all these questions.

Madam President, Commissioner, dear European Ombudsman, I would first like to congratulate and thank you on behalf of many of my compatriots who are eager for honesty, transparency and who still believe in justice. While Ms von der Leyen said a few days ago that she wanted Member States to think about a vaccine obligation for everyone, the Commission continued to hide the text messages exchanged between her and the CEO of Pfizer during the negotiation of the famous 90% redacted vaccine purchase contract. At the same time, Pfizer plans to sell $54 billion worth of COVID-19 vaccines and pills in 2022. Why this lack of transparency on the part of the Commission? Why this contempt? Why this disconnection with citizens? Why so much secrecy in Brussels, when they do not hesitate to embrace Washington by self-congratulation? Keep going, dear lady. This case is serious, and we are with you. Some do not want to see this convoy of liberties, this peaceful and civic demonstration in Brussels, Strasbourg and Paris, while it is also the consequence of this contempt and opacity of our European institutions. Thank you. You have our full support.

Mr President, this debate is about the future of European youth after the pandemic. But let's talk about the present. The good news is that, for you, there will be an end to the pandemic. May President Macron and his acolytes hear you, in order to put an end as soon as possible to this health dictatorship established in France for two years. Two years of hell for our French youth, who have spawned suicides, school dropouts, lost internships in companies and, to top it all off, a mandatory vaccine to play sports, go to the cinema or discotheque. A broken youth, children martyred with masks of PCR tests imposed at the last minute of Ibiza. Indeed, history will remember that live from this island dedicated to the holiday, on January 2, the Minister of Education and Youth, Jean-Michel Blanquer, announced the new COVID protocol to be applied in schools. With a COVID vaccine so ineffective against contagion and unsuitable for young people, should we still push for mandatory vaccination of this population? It's time to get back to reason. More than 115,000 children aged 5 to 9 were injected in France. How many in the other Member States? Pfizer makes 90% margin with its vaccine. But for our young people, is the benefit greater than the risk? According to the EMA, there are 6,000 suspicious deaths of all ages, medical alerts for nearly 1,000 children, including 407 babies. In France, last summer alone, it is 917 myocarditis. I think of this 16-year-old who took his dose to play sports and ended up in the emergency room in Montpellier. In the face of COVID, there are countries that have preserved the freedom of their fellow citizens and others that have preferred to sacrifice their youth. One day, they will have to answer to this sacrificed youth.

Madam President, Commissioner, Vice-President, ladies and gentlemen, today, of the 20 largest digital companies in the world, only one is European. It is the German company SAP. As you know, the digital giants of Silicon Valley, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, the GAFAM, govern almost the entire digital sector in Europe. For years, the GAFAM have abused their monopoly power, taking advantage of the neoliberal dogma and laxity of the Commission: Irish digital dumping, transfer of European data to the US, approval of Facebook's takeover of Instagram, big US tech companies have bought or stifled any potential European rival. For a long time, we were the only ones talking about strategic autonomy and a year ago, the Commission finally proposed the Digital Markets Act, the DMA. As always, this proposal was too late, too weak and too insufficient. On behalf of the ID Group, I defended much stricter measures against the digital giants. This will allow GAFAMs to be fined up to 20% of their overall turnover. In the event of serious infringements, the dismantling of the largest companies will now be possible. We also insisted on the freedom of payment methods and the interoperability of social networks. And on my own initiative, and I congratulate the rapporteur, the DMA includes a provision on whistleblowers. Whistleblowers, such as Frances Haugen, will be protected when they report abuses by digital giants. Brussels will thus be able to prevent killer acquisitions. We'll see if she does. As the GAFAM have ignored the Brussels administration so far, I had even called for personal sanctions against the leaders in case of serious and intentional misconduct. For Europe to regain its strategic autonomy, the Commission and states like France will have to show a real willingness to act. This is a first step. We want to go further. To develop a European industrial and technological base in the digital sector, a priority for local or European production is needed in public procurement in Europe. But national and European preference, ladies and gentlemen, why do you not want it? Yes, let us dare to reserve a cloud and employment quota for Europeans in Europe. Let us dare to impose that the data of European citizens should preferably be processed in Europe. Here we are in Strasbourg, capital of the Christmas market, and I also take this opportunity to wish everyone a Merry Christmas.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, riots in Rotterdam and Brussels, live ammunition against citizens and a vaccine obligation that will be imposed in Austria and elsewhere. This week, the German health minister said that at the end of winter, Germans will be vaccinated, cured or dead. And not a single Member, who is always quick to react to riots on the other side of the world, showed up here during this plenary session. Worse, not a word about our stockpiles of AstraZeneca vaccines being shipped to the African continent. A vaccine withdrawn, not recommended following serious side effects in Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Luxembourg, France and Norway. Your plan for global vaccination, let's talk about it. A few days ago, the President of the European Commission, Ms von der Leyen, was in Washington to present, in gala attire and without a mask, the award for best business leader to the CEO of Pfizer, Mr Bourla, with the fine little elevator music – a film! The CEO of Pfizer, no doubt grayed by this von der Leyen award, has announced 4 billion doses for 2022. Wow! No shortage for the sixth dose. Negotiations by SMS, parts of hidden contracts, non-existent liability clauses... this is what Brussels signs. So is this the role of the European Union in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic? The head of the French government said on July 21 that double-dose vaccination prevents COVID-19 contamination. We learn this week that he himself, although doubly vaccinated, has just been declared positive for COVID-19. I wish Mr Castex well. This event should serve as a lesson in humility for all of us. What we know is that we know nothing. So let us keep verbal threats and brutal measures in order to give priority to prevention, precaution and free choice, the basis of our European democracies.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, EUR 500 billion in 2030: the global cloud market is a major challenge for France and Europe. But this market only goes in one direction: to the United States. Only 5% of European data is stored in Europe. Even the French government favors Google and Microsoft. Military data and health data are managed by these companies while French players such as OVH and Scaleway offer sovereign solutions. Negotiations on the DMA (the future Digital Markets Act) should allow Europe to regain control over certain practices by Google, Amazon and Facebook. But how will the European Commission be able to check and inspect these companies outside Europe? The Americans, on the other hand, oblige service providers to disclose to the authorities any information, whether inside the United States or on the other side of the world. In this transatlantic forum, you have to be the voice of the truly European companies that make engineers work in Europe. Don’t just listen to the Digitaleurope lobby, as the Korean Samsung, Chinese Huawei, Facebook, Google and Amazon are funding this lobby. Mr Chao-Muller, director of the Digitaleurope lobby, does not represent our interests.