Speeches

Madam President, the debate on housing is a very important one. A political debate that certainly needs to be held, but not in this chamber. Firstly, because the European Union does not have jurisdiction over housing, and this is yet another example of the Commission's misuse of jurisdiction. The second reason, which is not legal, but political, is that you play firefighters. While you deplore the lack of housing, you organise the arrival of millions of migrants throughout Europe, with the obligation, among others, for the States to house them, that is to say to devote a part, or even all, of the available social housing. In France, a guide was sent to mayors for the settlement of migrants in rural areas. In the Netherlands, a housing division policy is being put in place to make room for newcomers. The last reason why you should not take care of housing is that, as soon as the European Union deals with a subject – for example coal, steel, vaccines, energy, cars – it ends up in a general collapse.

Mr President, at the end of your previous term of office you voted on the migration pact. This pact, drawn up in an immigrationist climate, is now completely out of step. An increasing number of countries are expressing their intention to reduce their immigration, such as Germany, or even not to implement the Pact, such as Poland or Hungary. Others discard themselves by asking for derogations. It is understandable that they are not circumstances, but that they are eminently political. Over the course of the elections – and again this weekend in Portugal – public opinion in European countries shows their growing exasperation with immigration, which they no longer want and which they regard as an existential threat to their country. The Commission cannot ignore these converging political signs and maintain a pact that, in its philosophy and aims, is no longer fit for purpose. In these circumstances, it is time to take note of the political turnaround in Europe and to review the philosophy of the Migration Pact, to steer European cooperation not towards more immigration, but towards extremely strict control of migration flows.

Mr President, having missed all the technological shifts of the 21st century, Europe is about to miss a new turning point, that of sustainable fuels. The EU imposes binding biofuel production targets on both the air and maritime industries, and that is fortunate. But it gives no way to achieve them. It regulates, overregulates, but does not plan. She throws goals in the air, but doesn't invest. With its ultraliberal logic, it lets the market do. Consequence: China imposes itself on the sector, takes the monopoly of the means of production, for example with electrolysis. Your laissez-faire, your laissez-aller are setting up new dependencies for Europe. I come from France, a country with a Colbertist tradition, and I believe it is imperative that Europe really supports and accompanies its sustainable fuels sector by helping all actors – shipowners, airlines and energy companies – to build a real sovereign industrial strategy.

Mr President, the recent agreement between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, although fragile but welcome, underlines the European Union’s negligence in this appalling war. Insurrection, because you have diplomatically disarmed member countries such as France or Belgium which, for historical or linguistic reasons, were legitimate to act. You neutralized them without doing anything on your side. Insurrection, because you have allowed Rwanda, an aggressor country, to receive the raw materials stolen from the DRC. The ceasefire wrested by the United States from Donald Trump obliges you to impose on Rwanda the effective departure of its troops from Congolese territory, the total disarmament of the M23 criminal militia and an end to the looting of Congolese wealth. There is also the issue of internal refugees from Congo, of which the European Union must be concerned, as it is rightly concerned with the fate of civilian populations in other wars and, again this morning, with the civilian population of Ukraine. Finally, you have a duty to establish, for the benefit of both parties, trade relations with the great country of Congo. The agreement just signed calls us to action. I understand that the Commission wanted to act: We will see what these words are worth.

Mr President, under the tutelage of the European Union, the countries of Europe have missed all the technological turning points: mobile, screens, electric vehicles, nanotechnologies, space, robotics, cloud, digital, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and so on. The problem lies in the principles that drive you: the globalist vision, when the whole world has embarked on the path of protectionism, research and production; the logic of degrowth of which you have made your model while the United States, with MAGA, launches us a challenge of power; bureaucratic logic, when it is necessary to release the energies and the productive creativity. You have not kept the promise of progress that was yours because you have renounced progress itself. You profess that the solution would be in standardization and not in innovation, in prohibition and not in production, in bureaucratization and not in simplification. In short, to bring Europe into the third technological millennium, into a merciless world, it is all your software that needs to be rethought.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, built on an alleged promise of peace, the European Union is gradually turning into an actor of war. Even before consulting the Parliament, whose activity is in reality cosmetic, the Commission barricades itself in a warmongering posture when circumstances demand peace. Worse, you maintain wars in the world, for example by making you the recipient of raw materials looted by Rwanda in Congo. Every crisis is an opportunity to seize undue prerogatives, even outside the legal framework of the Treaties. You are not only betraying the promise of peace, the letter of the treaties, but also the requirement of democracy when you admit the ban on television channels in France, or when you endorse the cancellation of elections when they are unfavourable to you, as in Romania. The EU actually reveals its true nature: that of an empire which – that is the essence of empires – is based on an insatiable quest for territorial, legal and political expansion. The reason and the necessary respect for the people, as well as the lessons of history, should remind you that this imperial roadmap is doomed to failure.

Mr President, if immigration were the only solution to the trades in tension, it is good news that there would be no more trades in tension. Believing that immigration could address the health workforce shortage is an illusion. It is even the worst solution, because the exploitation of a foreign workforce that is not very attentive will only have the effect of maintaining unattractive wages, difficult working conditions and unresolved hardship in the health care sector. The solution lies, on the other hand, in the improvement of working conditions, particularly wages. If it proves costly, it will be for our countries a choice of society that, for our part, we are ready to assume. The attractiveness of these professions is also due to the reduction of arduousness and we are obviously thinking of a large equipment plan based on AI and robotics. Alongside our Member States, which have sole competence in the field of health, the EU is invited to support research on these subjects and, of course, to implement innovative and concrete applications to serve these professions.

Mr President, alternative fuels are an illustration of a certain inconsistency on the part of the European Union. You issue rules, impose them on our sectors, in this case air and maritime, then you let the market decide. The result is sectors that do not know which technical processes to devote themselves to, infrastructure, for example at airports, which you do not care about, but above all production sectors that benefit the Chinese, such as the electrolysis phase for certain fuels. What about subsidy distortions? When the US subsidizes 3 the entire sector, you subsidize 0.5 by being overly selective. Europe must quickly emerge from its naivety and protect its emerging industries by implementing economic protection. Without this, the revolution in new fuels will occur, of course, but outside Europe, and especially to its detriment.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, you have made immigration a religion because the criminal activity of smugglers served your ideological purpose. You have turned a blind eye to their misdeeds and even decriminalized any complicity with them. You have almost made them auxiliaries of your migration project, distributing the roles with the complicit NGOs. This is Cologne syndrome, or mass rape in Britain: as it is about immigration, we refuse to see the criminal and even human reality. This is a moral mistake, because there is nothing worse than human traffickers, who enslave, rape, kill or are able to throw people into the sea. This is an unforgivable mistake, because these criminal organisations, those of smugglers and those of drug traffickers, pose an existential problem for our States. Once installed, they corrupt officials, threaten judges and journalists and, if necessary, murder. They already control our ports and take over entire neighbourhoods in our countries. Guilty tolerance of them only encourages them.

Mr President, everyone will welcome the fact that the Commission is finally deigning to take an interest in the lives of farmers, in their well-being, or rather in their professional, and often personal and family ill-being. It is clear that you are largely responsible for this real human disaster. When you embarked on the green transition, you responded to demands that were more ideological than empathetic, more mechanical than realistic. Your ideological and ecological wokism leads you to consider farmers as so-called oppressors of nature, and therefore to see in them enemies to be slaughtered. Your green transition is not a transition, but a revolution. With the brutality you show, with your standards, your injunctions, your prohibitions, your condemnations, it is more a result of the Chinese Cultural Revolution than a concerted process adapted to reality. You crushed some, bought others, made the third disappear. The only way to find a human approach would be to renounce your method, your ideological certainties, your dangerous hostility.

Mr President, after five years of the Green Deal, which is the modest name for degrowth, now, faced with the industrial, energy and agricultural collapse of our countries, you are brandishing the idea of competitiveness under the enlightened influence of Hungary. It is true that there is urgency: With his watchword "MAGA", the new US president is confronting Europeans with a power challenge. This competitiveness pact still bears its name poorly; it links commonplaces and contradictions and is not based on any fundamental break with the practices that led Europe to its technical and economic dropout. As Mrs von der Leyen clearly confirmed this morning, you are unable to break with your theological vision of unbridled free trade, with your normative approach and, above all, with the decreasing vision that the Greens have instilled in the institutions. It is obvious that you will continue to bring Europe to erasure and vassalage as long as you dance around this totem of degrowth. We prefer, for Europe, the path of power.

Mr President, the issue of product safety is not always about legal development or standards, but about controls. She raised the question of the gateways to Europe, and the gateways to Europe were the ports. On Le Havre, out of 6,000 containers, only 5 are checked. In general, all European ports tend to be taken over by the mafias, either through fear and threat or through corruption. Nobody cares. How can we believe that free trade can be virtuous when even the most basic rules of surveillance are in practice flouted in places where controls should be relentless? What about raw materials that are sold in Europe by countries that do not own them, but steal them? The Democratic Republic of Congo is thus looted by its neighbour, Rwanda, and Europe is committing acts of concealment by purchasing such raw materials from Kigali. If you want to bring some ethics back into trade without limits and rules, re-establish the necessary controls.

Madam President, two years ago you decided to end the marketing of combustion engines in Europe and, in fact, to end combustion engines. An industry that loses its domestic market loses any chance of being powerful at exporting. You have done so in the name of decreasing ideology and you have committed our countries to the all-electric impasse. You made this decision without an impact assessment or a forward-looking view. Worse, in your dogmatic drive, you impose on our manufacturers targets for the sale of all-electric vehicles under penalty of sanctions. However, with the collapse of the all-electric market that does not find its customers, he sees the prospect of heavy fines, which the boss of Renault estimates at 15 billion euros. All European manufacturers, manufacturers and equipment manufacturers, are rightly sounding the alarm. Not only do you need to revisit this issue of penalties, but on the 2035 ban, you need to operate without waiting for the review clause.

Madam President, I would like to raise a serious issue here, but one that seems to be a blind spot in the European Union's thinking on transport, the safety of goods and people, and sovereignty. I am referring to the control of ports, i.e. the gateways to Europe. At the port of Le Havre in France, one container out of every 5,000 is checked. One container in 5,000. We know that most drugs enter Europe through ports, in the middle of goods, and that traffickers rule there between death threats and corruption, and sometimes the murder or assassination of recalcitrant port agents. The ports are the first territories in Europe that gangs and transnational criminal organizations have invested and I would even say conquered. We also know that free trade agreements, which are already very lax, are being circumvented and that illegal imports of products are common. These imports are free of all norms or are outright illegal. However, free trade means fair and above all legal trade. What good is it to worry, rightly, about the regular takeover of European ports by foreign states, in the name of sovereignty, if it is to abandon them to the mafias? That is why I would ask you to look at this issue of port control. Behind the security of ports is that of Europe as a whole.

Mr President, never has a document been so badly named as the Strategic Dialogue for the future of EU agriculture, presented last week. It is more a monologue than a dialogue, since your so-called consultation is, as usual, a Potemkin democracy. In agricultural matters, the EU has no strategy, but simply the obtuse application of a decreasing and anti-speciesist ideological vision from which you are unable to free yourself. When will you understand that Europe will die of your wokist vision which envisages man, and especially Western man, as a predator of nature, a man who must be accused of all evils, a man whose activities should be extinguished? And what about Mercosur, which is an anti-agricultural provocation. In the age of food sovereignty, you are turning your back on growth and even more on power.

Mr President, as the unpopularity of your Green Deal grows across Europe, you are trying to impute, I quote, to the far right the revolt of European opinions against your green follies. I see it as a form of conspiracy that is ready to smile, since it emanates from those who have made this term the mechanical response to any revelation of their turpitudes, even proven. I see this as an inability to engage in the debate that characterises the European Union, which would have us believe that there is never any other alternative than what it proposes. There is no alternative is the very negation of democracy and the free choice of people and peoples. Finally, I see it as the beginning of the ideological victory of those who refuse your wokist logic, this self-flagellating and destructive vision, which intends to consider the human being as an oppressor of nature, as a predator of other species, as a species to be relegated and even crushed. We stand for a high vision of man, a responsible and enlightened man. It is a fundamentally humanistic vision, the vision that the multi-millennial Europe has always held and that the European Union wants to challenge.

Mr President, after the ban on the sale of thermal cars in 2035, we discover over the days the amateurism that led you to the ‘all-electric’: the lack of sufficient electricity production, the unresolved lack of vehicle autonomy, the problem of battery recycling and dependence on China. Associations are now alerting us to the planned obsolescence of electric vehicles: increasingly complex software in electric cars, electronic components, some of which are difficult to find, and parts that are not in continuous production. It is more than urgent to ensure the durability of the parts of electric cars and to make the components that make them repairable, in particular the batteries that are often unbreakable. Behind all this is the impossibility for an owner to resell his electric vehicle and above all the paradoxical idea for your allegedly ecological project of a disposable car. You need to intervene on this issue of obsolescence. Unless the decision to turn its back on the thermal car was in reality only the decision to put an end to the car civilisation altogether.

Mr President, the European Union had to be an organisation between nations. Its Parliament has become the standards office of a centralised unitary state. After the ban on thermal cars in 2035 and the banning of vehicles in urban areas, the European Commission had planned, with this Euro 7 standard, a new screwdriver allegedly ecological and in reality directed against our automotive industry. Your up-to-the-stop service would have meant an additional cost of EUR 2 000 for cars and EUR 12 000 for heavy vehicles. It would have forced the Renault group to close four of its factories. Under pressure from the Greens, in fact, you have adopted a "decreasingist" logic. You promised Europe-power, you only proposed Europe-degrowth. A decline that the instinct of life of the peoples pushes them to refuse. In the face of opposition, including now in your own majority, you are obliged to water down this text. We welcome that. But, like the agricultural revolt in Europe, you must see this imposed retreat as a solemn warning.

Mr President, the ACP meeting in Luanda was a total political failure. Let us be clear, I am not calling into question the work of Parliament’s staff or our Angolan hosts, who deserve all the praise. The first day showed a state of unpreparedness that manifested itself in public recriminations by several African delegations and the worst difficulties in simply approving the Rules of Procedure. The outright invocation of the values of the European Union could legitimately be interpreted as a neo-colonial will on the part of Europe to impose its standards. The almost exclusive plenary format did not address the real issues: famine, the processing of African raw materials before export, technical cooperation, etc. Why not organise round tables that could have brought together African and European parliamentarians, who would thus have facilitated direct exchanges and human contacts? I suggest that for the next meetings, you come out of the grand-messages and an uncredible communication on the diplomatic know-how of the European Union.

Madam President, when you talk to us about preventive diplomacy, it is not a question for the European Union, out of pacifism or humanism, of avoiding conflicts in the world. It is for you to extend the competences of the European Union in international relations. Your agenda is determined by what you want to be or appear to be, that is, a state recognized on the international scene. We challenge your imperial vision and believe that only states, true states, historical and recognized states have authority to settle the conflicts of the world. The EU has neither the vocation nor the legitimacy to intervene in political diplomacy. Be content with scientific or technological diplomacy and at this level, all in all honourable, you will be faithful to Europe's vocation and its intellectual influence. For the rest, let the nations, the true nations, do.

Mr President, it is the practice of thugs to denigrate those they meet. This is exactly what the US is doing by applying the principle of extraterritoriality of US law, i.e. the application of its right to the entire planet. This is the western. All the pretexts are good for bringing the companies they have targeted under their jurisdiction, prosecuting them and convicting them. Under the pretext of legal moralisation, it is in fact a question of subjecting non-US companies to US rules – and, in reality, to US interests. It is also a question of weakening competitors, stealing their know-how and even destroying them legally and in the media in order to buy them more easily. This extraterritoriality of US law is a veritable process of economic warfare, an act of legal piracy from which many European companies, particularly French companies, suffer. This is evidenced by the organised looting of Alstom, a French flagship artificially trained in a legal-criminal soap opera, to be picked up in unworthy conditions by its American rival General Electric. We cannot ignore this little-known but real threat to all our businesses and ultimately to our economies. If there is a level at which it is relevant to act, it is at European level. Europe, the real Europe, by its history, by its nature, cannot be satisfied with remaining in a position of vulnerability and vassalage. (The speaker refused a blue card question by Marie-Pierre Vedrenne)

Madam President, in a few months you have seen two election warnings coming from the Netherlands. First in April, with the victory of the Citizen Farmers’ Movement, the BBB, and more recently with the victory of Geert Wilders’ PVV. This major shift, with the crushing defeat of Frans Timmermans, the promoter of your Green Deal, is interpreted as a disavowal of your ‘decreasing’ policy. In France, at the moment, a protest movement is growing in the agricultural world, where the Dutch were returning the flags as a sign of a call for help, the French are returning the city entrance signs. It is a way of saying that you walk on your head. You will have noticed when you came to Parliament that the entrance sign to the city of Strasbourg, where we are sitting today, has also returned. Our farmers express their exasperation at the abuse of standards (rhythms, costs, etc.). What they condemn is the absence of mirror clauses in your free trade treaties – which creates unfair competition – an ecology that is not participatory but punitive, a logic not of improvement but of limitation and prohibition. You cannot pretend that nothing is happening.

Mr President, everyone agrees with the idea of combating over-consumption, waste, unnecessary production and, from this point of view, the tracking down of packaging, which is both ephemeral and useless, can only win support. In principle, no objection, but it is the implementing text that causes problems. As every time, you are in the "all or nothing". You are sinking into absurd normative madness. In this case, you include in your regulations our boxes of cheese made of wood, camembert or other, traditional and biodegradable packaging that are essential to make the product live and give it its taste quality. You have the genius to turn a good idea into an aberration, a consensus into a pushback. In reality, this lack of nuance and knowledge, this lack of discernment and elegance, this lack of savoir-vivre and this contempt for people are emblematic of what the European Union is deeply about: a bureaucracy that knows only accounting or statistical logics, a moralizing empire that wants to eliminate national realities. We do not forget that Europe is first and foremost people, people with their way of life.