What Nacho spoke about.

Madam President, you mentioned it: We commemorate the European Day of the Victims of Terrorism every 11 March because 11 March 2004 was the deadliest jihadist attack on European soil in Madrid. One hundred and ninety-one people died directly from the attack, plus two policemen died later, as a result of the assault on the floor where the terrorists were hiding. One hundred and ninety-three fatalities and more than two thousand wounded. The ten bombs exploded in four trains that in the early morning carried thousands of workers, workers and students from the outskirts to the center of Madrid. And I would like to highlight a fact perhaps less known to the Honourable Members: There were the deaths of seventeen nationalities, immigrant workers who were striving to find a better future among us. From that horror emerged the best of our society. An immense wave of solidarity toured the entire city, all of Spain and all of Europe from the very first minute. It was our best response to barbarism, as it was after other attacks in Brussels, Nice, London, Paris or Oslo. There were elections three days later and they were held normally, although in a climate of pain, showing the resilience of Spanish democracy. The same resilience we showed... (the Chair took the floor from the speaker).

Mr. President, Azerbaijan recovered what it had lost by force. The problem is that the war didn't end there, that this is a postwar one that looks like anything but a postwar one. With what has happened in Nagorno-Karabakh, with the non-fulfilment of many of the clauses of that declaration, which is not a peace treaty, with that completely extraordinary request to create a kind of extraterritorial corridor, completely violating the sovereignty of Azerbaijan, which Nathalie Loiseau referred to as a plan of Baku, Moscow and Ankara, because that would allow a departure of Turkey to the Caspian. I believe that we must work for a peace treaty that is not humiliating, that is fair and that does not hypothesize the future of Armenia. And then we can get into that other ambitious agenda, which Viola von Cramon-Taubadel was talking about, deepening the relationship of the European Union – perhaps with a future perspective – towards closer rapprochement in all aspects.

Mr President, a methodological warning about the report: traditionally, we have always done so without geographical or personal references. That has always been the scope of the report. We included Ukraine two years ago and this year we are going to include Gaza. There is widespread agreement that it is a worthwhile matter but there is no reference to Navalny, no reference to Assange, no reference to personal cases. In the same way that if we defend the right of LGTBI people, we do not promote any type of sexual preference. We defend the freedom of creation and do not force anyone to write a novel. What we are defending is a right. I want to get into an issue such as the inevitable tension between a geopolitical approach to our foreign policy and a value-based approach. But I think that also the people who work in the field of human rights have to renew a little our narrative and start saying something that is said little. Mr Borrell, the geopolitical Commission, the language of power... we are not a world apart, angelic in which we do not realize what is happening in the world. I think we have to find a lace and the one I would propose would be the following: a policy of human rights and the promotion of democracy in the world is very important from a security point of view. Democracies are predictable. There is critical press, there is freedom of the press, there is free thought and public opinion. And that makes democracies predictable. Those who are unpredictable are autocrats, in which greed, stomach ulcer or fear of their future leads them to do things that turn the entire area in which they work upside down. So let's tell people that a world of democracies is a safer world. It's not just a fairer world, it's also a safer world. And we will be approximating those two logics: geopolitics and values that are sometimes – it has to be recognised – not easy to coordinate or put together.

Madam President, as was foreseeable – unfortunately – the report on human rights and democracy in the world and the European Union’s policy on this matter this year reflects the disastrous reality of the human rights situation in the world, and – perhaps for that reason – it is useful to make a political reflection on what the framework is, what are the underlying currents that feed this situation. The fact that a person, by the simple fact of being one, has a set of inherent, inalienable, individual, indivisible rights is a conquest of civilization. It has probably taken thirty centuries of history for us to reach that conviction. However, that framework, which has generally not been questioned – the existence of rights inherent in being a person was not publicly questioned – is now beginning to find an antagonistic model, clearly. Thus, authoritarian and liberal regimes are questioning the universality of rights with many accounts, but they come to agree on the idea that this universal rights is a new strategy of cultural hegemony of the West or a neocolonial strategy to continue influencing other parts of the world with this ideological approach. That tension extends to all spheres of international relations. Therefore, it is – if I may say so – a kind of culture war, because there are two completely opposite models: that of democracies and that of authoritarian systems. It is an ideological fight in which sometimes I think we have missed a more defiant, more open, more challenging attitude of democracies that reaffirmed the commitment to human rights. These are the challenges that give rise to this report. We have to work with civil society, we have to defend human rights defenders – especially in many more hostile environments where they have to move – we have to work with international cooperation and tackle human rights violations together and we have to remain fully anchored in human rights policy in the European Union’s foreign policy and diplomacy. The promotion of human rights and democracy in the world is not an option, it is not a policy, it is a legal obligation derived from the Treaties and, therefore, that affects all institutions. When I say all the institutions I mean the ones we are in this part of Belliard Street and the part over there of Belliard Street, because sometimes it seems that in the part over there of Belliard Street the logic is the Realpolitik pure and hard; And in this part of Parliament's Belliard Street everything is an approximation of values. We need to agree on the tone we take in the world to address our interlocutors in the international arena on the issue of human rights. And the same in Parliament: the human rights agenda in this Parliament has suffered a lot lately with the conservative policies that have called into question some of the work of the Subcommittee on Human Rights and the need to make human rights emergencies, which have tried to bury the emergencies at the end of Wednesday afternoons, which have even - some groups - not participated in the drafting and negotiation of human rights emergencies. Another element is an exaggerated promotion of the institutional role of the Subcommittee on Security and Defence to the detriment of the Subcommittee on Human Rights. Another is the attacks and difficulties of human rights NGOs - with the excuse of the human rights scandal. Qatargate— to work in this house and the lack of protection of an essential element of our human rights policy. I would also like to say that another element is the fact that this report on human rights and democracy in the world and the European Union's policy on this subject, one of the three reports made by the Committee on Foreign Affairs, is being dealt with here today and, tomorrow, issues relating to security and foreign policy are being dealt with in another format in this House. I would like to thank my fellow shadow rapporteurs, some of whom are here, for the work they have done. It has been a very gratifying job, but our description of the human rights situation is sadly terrible.

Madam President, Commissioner, the disproportion of the Israeli military response destroys any hint of the right to self-defence. It is now pure impunity. For those who justify that answer, think about whether or not it is proportionate. Israel has killed 30,000 people, 70% of them women and children, to neutralise – that is the word used – 6,000 terrorists: a ratio of five to one, five civilians per terrorist. That is, if tomorrow a terrorist in a European city kidnaps five people - two women, two children and one adult - for many people in this House the solution is to kill all six. That's the ratio and that's the logic that seems to be ethically acceptable when you've asked here what the limit is. But of course, I am talking, in my example, about European women and children, not Palestinian women and children. And that hierarchy between victims is ethically rotten.

Madam President Hautala, Commissioner Schmit, I would first like to congratulate Željana Zovko on her leadership and the shadow rapporteurs on their flexibility, and to connect this dossier with another one that is voted on tomorrow without debate, which is that of Jordi Solé's parliamentary diplomacy and which has just been mentioned by Lukas Mandl. Overall, I believe that they complete a political reflection that we have carried out throughout the legislature and that has a certain value, in which we have dealt with many topics: cultural diplomacy, intelligence, sanctions, the Diplomatic School - an initiative coming out of this Parliament - which make up a good reflection package. In Mediterranean areas we usually say that fires go out in winter. That is the spirit of preventive diplomacy, a diplomacy more necessary than ever in this devilish reactive international scenario to which the Commissioner referred. The report is very comprehensive, it is impossible to go over it, but I want to highlight a point of view that is the need for the cultural adaptation of our diplomacy to the different scenarios in which it has to act.

Mr President, Commissioner, Madam Secretary of State, in matters of enlargement there always seems to be a traditional tension that sometimes becomes a kind of false dilemma between geopolitical considerations and those of the examination of values and principles. Unfortunately, the geopolitical situation always plays to lower the demands on the coincidence of values. It is true that, historically, the processes of enlargement of the Union have taken place in geopolitical situations: the three democracies of the South after their transitions, the rapprochement of the whole East after the fall of the Soviet empire... But the path of adherence is a normative and values-focused path, in which there are no shortcuts. I use the same expression that Mr Bilčík used. It is normative, non-transactional and merit-based. Beware, therefore, of excessive flexibilities for geopolitical reasons: because, in addition, some other candidates, such as Turkey, will play any flexibility in favour of their conditions. And, of course, it will have to be considered, at some point, whether an accession process can last forever without any progress as is the case with Turkey.

Mr President, Mr Borrell, I would like to thank you for your impeccable political position, but also for your moral position in the not-too-easy management of such a poisoned conflict. I regret that the Commission (which started fatally), after the damage that Commissioner Várhelyi's initial position did to the European Union, today has dedicated itself only to describing the situation without establishing any political responsibility for what is happening. Mr Borrell, I would like to warn you and my colleagues of the enormous risk we run from accusations from the Global South that the Union acts with double moral standards in its judgments on the many recent conflicts. Some accusations rightly and others not, but the risk of the ultimate disarmament of our soft power is there. We, so exhibitionists of our principles and values, cannot offer the world a dangerous picture of moral incoherence, judging conflicts or military operations across international borders differently with preemptive excuses. For this House, respect for international law is our compass, without preferences or exceptions. And it hurts us whether dead children are Israelis or Palestinians.

Madam President, thank you, Commissioner, for remembering that naivety of the end of history and that we were heading for a world of democracies. Thank you, Mrs Hautala, for remembering that we met a few years ago on an electoral mission in Armenia. I also agreed with Mr Mariani on some other election mission and I wanted to address precisely some of the issues to which he referred, and in a different way also Mr Wallace. When we are going to make an electoral observation we do so at the invitation of the Government, so it is difficult to argue that this is an interference with the sovereignty of a country or is an interference in internal affairs. In fact, the problem that the European Union now has is that we are no longer receiving invitations because these illiberal regimes do not want witnesses to their practices around elections. And it is true, as Mr Wallace said, that perhaps we appear as someone who wants to act in a paternalistic way, but we do so at the invitation of the countries, and the countries invite us and ask us to make recommendations to them to improve their electoral system, which is what we dedicate ourselves to. And I would like to recall that we exercise this function of electoral observation, together with others of promoting democracy, not only because of a conviction about the universality of the values we defend, but also because of an interest. This is not just the export of the Western world, of its values, sometimes labeled neocolonial. What I remind you is that a world of democracies is a safer world because democracies are predictable, because democracies have systems of checks and balances, have a free press and critical public opinion, and therefore their decisions are generally quite predictable. And yet authoritarian systems are characterized because a single person's humor can provoke war or disaster. I would therefore like to recall that these recommendations that we issued (and which I believe should be placed more high on the European Union's foreign policy agenda) are made at the invitation of the countries we visited. Thank you to all the negotiators. I think the recommendation has turned out very well. And thank you for the excellent debate.

Madam President, in this intimate last-minute atmosphere I am grateful for the attention of Members, with some of whom I have negotiated as shadow rapporteurs and with whom it has been a real pleasure to draft this document, which I would like to frame in what has been the legislative policy of some committees in this legislative period. Because, in foreign policy, we sometimes jump from crisis to crisis without there being an adequate time to reflect on the horizontal aspects of politics or on the instruments of foreign policy. And yet, in this last part of the legislature I believe that we have produced a good package of documents and recommendations, among which I would point out the one on preventive diplomacy and others on parliamentary diplomacy, the defence of multilateralism, the functioning of the European External Action Service, the idea of the European Diplomatic School, cultural diplomacy and collaboration with intelligence services in external crises. And now we would like, with this recommendation, to unite the concern of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Subcommittee on Human Rights, in which we have wondered for years how to deal with the growing presence and assertiveness of authoritarian and illiberal regimes, regimes that continue to maintain a very essential characteristic despite the democratic deterioration, which is to pretend that they make elections, in such a way that the urn remains a kind of totem of the tribe even in some of the most brutal dictatorships: We must pretend that we have democratic legitimacy. And that is why the nature of election observation itself is changing. Election observation has for many years been a form of assistance to countries to make elections better and in this climate it is becoming a kind of early warning system about the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes. This Recommendation addresses the issue from a different perspective from the ones we have used so far: from the point of view of the right of every citizen to participate in fair and free elections. The right of participation is not a right that has as much tradition as the right of expression, demonstration, or assembly, but it is in all international treaties of rights and allows us, therefore, to use it as another element in the ideological confrontation with authoritarian and illiberal systems because we can activate it as a citizen right. Therefore, in this Recommendation we link with the fact that elections are a process: Beware of an impression, given in authoritarian systems, that elections are a thing that happens one day, while the entire lengthy process of registration of participants, party financing, access to media, access to the judiciary, preparation of censuses, seems to be out of the spotlight or what ordinary citizens consider an election. Therefore, we must connect this right of participation with other rights of which I have spoken: meeting, demonstration... Care must be taken to ensure that the right of participation avoids any discrimination between voters and the question of information, which in these authoritarian regimes is in many cases mere propaganda by regimes, must be addressed. And for that we have tools, such as the dissemination of a counter-story against the narrative of democracies always about to fall, a new idea of international and internal electoral observation, the fight against disinformation (especially serious in electoral periods), the inclusion of electoral integrity in the human rights dialogues of the delegations of the European Union in other countries, and sanctions for those people who in illiberal systems hinder the right to participate, all within the framework of a policy that I believe we must continue to frame in the United Nations Human Rights Council. I thank the shadow rapporteurs, and it will be a pleasure to participate in the debate.

Madam President, Commissioner, congratulations on your work. You know that I tend to be very critical of your management, but I think that making ten reports from this entity is a great job for you and your team. I believe that, in Georgia, we are correcting the mistake that was made a few months ago. I believe that putting Georgia in a more proactive position will surely take away reasons from those who have less enthusiasm within the country to approach Europe. And, following the idea of Mr Bütikofer, there is one country, perhaps two, very particular in this package: Turkey is not walking forward. Turkey is not progressing lazily or with difficulties. Turkey backtracks on democratic standards and must therefore be put in a different situation. Beware of general offers to all candidate countries when not all political wills go in the same direction. I repeat an idea I told you this morning: There are no geopolitical shortcuts. It is one thing that the enlargement process is triggered by a geopolitical situation and another thing that the accession process is a merit-based process, in any case. I am talking about Turkey and I am also talking about some eastern neighbours. Therefore, be careful not to enter into this logic that in some candidate countries, as they need us for other reasons, they do not look at democratic standards.

Madam President, Mrs Montserrat, in Spain a customary constitutional procedure is being developed in which the king has commissioned a second investiture from Mr Sánchez because that of his leader has failed. And while the negotiators of the parliamentary forces are negotiating - I repeat, the parliamentary forces are negotiating - you have joined the Nazis, the Francoists and the fascists in organizing street rallies in which the police are even asked to disobey their authorities against a constitutional procedure. That is the real risk to the rule of law in Spain. Mr Tertsch, the position of the Spanish Government is clear, clear and repeated: condemns Hamas’ terrorist action, calls for containment and legality in Israel’s response and a humanitarian ceasefire. I think we would all do well if we listened a second time to what our colleague López Istúriz has just told us.

Madam President, being a global actor requires far more than mere political will. A thorough review of the actors and instruments of that foreign policy is required, because we jump from crisis to crisis and there is not much time to reflect on it. Who represents the European Union's foreign policy? The EPP colleague said that the solution to the question was Mrs von der Leyen. No, Mrs von der Leyen has created the question with a misdirected hyper-activism that is putting the European Union in a sometimes uncomfortable situation. With the same legal regulation, this question has never been asked in the past and today it is. Kissinger had a problem and Blinker still has it because there are still many phones to call and the President of the Commission is always communicating, because she said it today: I was talking to Jordan, to Egypt and to the Emirates. What is the President of the Commission doing speaking in this conflict with these countries? Under what mandate can you do it? And now, in addition, President Metsola joins this confused courtship of egos, for which the only recipe I recommend is to let Mr Borrell work, because at least Mr Borrell is not in a personal campaign. And let us properly fund the European External Action Service so that it does not have to negotiate every month the funds to carry out a foreign policy of the European Union.

Madam President, thank you to the speakers for their input and for suggesting matters that could have been included in the report. But I want to explain to you why we didn't think we should do it this year. The rapporteurs agreed on a short text without many particular mentions. More churches can be mentioned, more journalists can be mentioned, more cases can be mentioned, but the political message would remain the same. That is why I want you to understand what our approach has been in selecting amendments. But let's go to something more substantial. Commissioner, many of the honourable Members have spoken of the importance of Turkey - Mr Kyuchyuk, Mr Nistor, Mr Mandl - they have spoken of anchoring Turkey, of it being a partner, a neighbour, an ally. You are the Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement. That is why I think it is very important that, whenever we talk about Turkey, we distinguish between files with a neighbour and files with a candidate. Sometimes Turkey mixes them and I would not like it to be the Brussels criterion. The enlargement process is the accession process and it is the process based on values and the Copenhagen criteria. Neighborhood includes everything you said. It includes all digital, migration policies, everything we can collaborate with a neighbor, who will be welcome, but never mix it with the accession process, which is a process of a different, normative nature, and whose objective is an approach in principles and values, not only in interests. I would like both Parliament and the Commission to be on the same line when we talk to our Turkish colleagues, who distinguish those two areas, which are very different.

Mr President, the first thing I want to do is thank you for the work and the atmosphere that we have developed in drafting the report with my fellow shadow rapporteurs. I believe that we are putting together a common position, a position increasingly with a greater consensus and, therefore, a stronger and more robust position of this Parliament. This report, for the first time in many years, has had no votes against in the Committee on Foreign Affairs. The central issue of the report, recurrent and even boring, is the precarious state of health of Turkey's accession process. And to analyze that poor iron health of the process, this year, inevitably, we must talk about the recent elections in Turkey. I do not see what incentives the ruling elite can have to change their domestic or foreign policies when they have just been ratified in this process. In fact, what is appreciated in Turkey, domestic politics, is pure continuity. There are no actions concerning rights and freedoms. There are not even announcements of plans or reforms. It's pure continuity. Of course, as always, one week, a love letter from President Erdogan to the European Union, and the next week, a completely unfocused criticism based on half-truths, all for domestic nationalist consumption. With regard to the accession process, which should be at the heart of this report, not foreign policy and not the economy, which are adjectives and which have other frameworks, I believe that Turkey should receive some clear messages from this Parliament. The accession process is exhausted. That is my particular position. My fellow shadow rapporteurs consider that it is running out and, moreover, in my opinion, it is beginning to be dysfunctional because, as we have the accession process, we are not looking for alternative formulas to relate to Turkey and, therefore, that is preventing us from seeking a different framework, which is what the Council has asked Borrell, to examine a framework of relations with Turkey that is realistic and based on the real possibilities we have of relating to Turkey. The process is exhausted by an obvious lack of political will on the part of the Turkish ruling elite. You don't have to look for other responsibilities. There remains a simple empty shell in which we, the drafters of the report, intend in the end at least to protect the courageous pro-democratic and pro-European Turkish civil society, which is the only brake that I believe we have left to avoid euthanasia of the process. And, in order to become a member of the European Union, what you have to do is merit. This is a normative process, not a transactional process and therefore not based on negotiations or marketing. That's what Mr. Borrell just said in Georgia. It is a process based on the merits of the country and on achieving the goals that have been set. Therefore, this is not about geopolitics, it is not about drones, it is not about grain and it is not about the size of the army or the flag. For that there are other formats of our relationship. This will comply with the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights. This is going to put Kavala and Demirtaş on the street. This will stop attacking freedom of expression, leaving LGTBI people and associations alone, leaving the HDP alone, not imposing an Islamist agenda on the country's culture. If Turkey really wants to keep the accession process alive, let it put on the table, not declarations, but facts, actions and real progress. And it seems to me that, in recent weeks, the conflict in Cyprus and continuing to keep Stockholm waiting, of course, are not the best letters of introduction to approach the European Union or to resurrect a dying process.

Madam President, thanks to the excellent work of Natalie and Bilčík and the work in general of the Commission, represented by Raphaël. In addition to internal issues, the report says a lot of interesting things about protecting Parliament's image and good repute. For example, in matters such as electoral observation, it shows how electoral observation has to adapt to the interference that occurs long before the electoral event or the phenomenon of false electoral observation or informal or unauthorized electoral observation. We have to protect Parliament's good name also in election observation operations. I believe that the report reflects very well the progress that has been made in this House and how the way in which the House has defended its good name has finally been protected by the Court of Justice of the Union itself. It also includes NGOs: It is a good thing that organisations dealing with Parliament make their funding public, but we have to be aware that, in many authoritarian and liberal systems, if an NGO declares that it has money from the European Union, it will fall under the provisions of the Foreign Agents Act, and the report we are presenting today lays down precautions so that this cannot happen either. Sometimes our transparency can jeopardise the work of many actors operating in liberal countries and the report reflects this very well; I appreciate the flexibility of the rapporteurs to set it up.

Madam President, I would like to thank Mrs Kalniete and the negotiators who have again included a specific section on elections in the second report of the Special Committee on Foreign Interference. Elections are a goal because they are politically transcendent, but also because they are vulnerable. There are many people who only get hooked on political information when elections come. There is more technification, more digitization. Social media creates an environment in which those choices can be very vulnerable. In addition, by a recent investigation of European investigative journalists, we have discovered that there is a global market for election interference that has affected several elections in Africa. We have to be especially careful about the European elections. Not only because they affect a very relevant actor, but also because the European elections – being a single election – are held in 27 countries, with 27 different electoral systems and electoral infrastructures. Therefore, it is enough to find the weak link in the chain to cause interference that will affect not only that country, but all the European elections. The security and integrity of the European elections must therefore be high on our agenda in this last part of the legislature.

Mr President, as regards accountability for Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, a considerable effort has already been made as regards the legal bases for criminal prosecution. The collection and custody of evidence is already underway at the International Criminal Court in The Hague for this case of deported children and for other parallel cases. But this criminal prosecution has to be accompanied by a medium-term perspective: appropriate compensation for damage, including personal injury, not only physical damage. That is why I would like to draw colleagues' attention to a project by our neighbouring organisation, the Council of Europe. This will create in a month a register of damages with a view to claiming its repair from Russia. Funded by contributions from the Member States, many of us, and I believe that the European Union should join, are going to collect at an office in The Hague and at another office in Kiev the statements of damage suffered by citizens that the Ukrainian institutions deem appropriate. And I reiterate that the project includes not only physical damage or property damage, but also personal injury. And here must be understood, of course, the cases of children who must be returned, of course, and whose families must be compensated by the State responsible for so many brutalities.

Mr President, Mr Borrell, I will not insist on the obvious, which has already been said: the condemnation of the self-coup, the disproportion in the treatment of the protests or the possibility of turning the page with an election. There are other aspects that I want to discuss. The citizens who protest are no less citizens or have fewer rights to come from the rural world, to come from areas with a majority indigenous population or to come from poorer areas. Beware of that possible simplifying Manichaeism. That anger is very significant in political terms because it represents the abandonment by the urban capitalistic logics of a sector of the population fed up with not feeling represented in the ruling elites. Obviously, there is a bad constitutional design that will have to be corrected, but perhaps, pending a reform process – which does not have to be constituent – political practice must be refined and the mechanisms that have led to permanent governmental instability that now simply becomes ungovernable for the country must not be abused. Mr Borrell, we must build consensus and practical support from here to deeply restructure the police, create a professionalized administration and reform the judiciary, in order to develop, if possible, a common sense and a country project that also includes the rural and indigenous population.

Madam President, in the travaux préparatoires for this report, which has been carried out effectively and flexibly by Mrs Neumann, some harmful trends have been identified which should be emphasised. One is the topic of so-called silent diplomacy: a practice which, in the field of human rights, cannot be a general attitude, but a tool to use very exceptionally – as in the case of the negotiation of the release of a political prisoner – but it cannot be the way in which our embassies express themselves in countries that have human rights problems. Contact with human rights NGOs must be constant and systematic, and public statements must be frequent and expressive. Another trend is an implicit and perverse sharing of roles between EU Delegations and embassies of member countries. Thus, the EU Delegations take on the – less sympathetic – role of confronting the authorities with their human rights problems, and the embassies of the member countries engage in economic diplomacy, which is always friendly and rewarding. The obligation to put human rights at the heart of our foreign policy stems from the Treaties and is an obligation of the European Union and the Member States. That would be a good Team Europe.

Mr President, look, ladies and gentlemen, I refuse this false dichotomy of having to choose between the former president in prison, whom many of those sitting here recommended not to return to the country, and did so illegally in the middle of a campaign, Mr Saakashvili, and a government whose authoritarian drift is increasingly obvious. But we seem to agree to support civil society, and at least from there – I mean pro-democracy and pro-European civil society – we can build a consensus. I reiterate that it was a mistake not to put Georgia on the same footing as the other countries, to which we offered the candidacy, because that fueled Georgian Dream's anti-European narrative. We opened a huge space for that anti-European narrative to fill it, and it certainly did not serve to end the polarization that we said we cared so much about. Now we have to rebuild our levers of influence over the country in a situation infinitely worse than that of a few months ago, but it is our obligation to do so. And I call on all of you to support civil society, without confusing us with false dichotomies.

Mr. President, Mr. Borrell, if the famous urban legend of the frog in boiling water were true, this would be a good time to use it. We have let Israel go a long way in terms of freedoms and international law without proper wording. And now we find a judicial reform that its own president, so quoted here today, considers unacceptable, predatory and that dismantles the democratic foundations. I wonder what we would be saying if this was a project, for example, of Erdoğan. Would we be putting on so many hot cloths? Fortunately, there has been a backlash from civil society and there remains some hope for the country's future. That is why we must never confuse that civil society in Israel, which is in the streets protesting, with its government. We should also talk a little about the consequences, not only for the Palestinian population, but for the entire region. Israel was supposedly the only democracy in the Middle East. It never really was for the Palestinian population in the occupied territories, and now it risks becoming less so for Israeli society itself.

Mr President, Mr Paet, I thank you for your flexibility in negotiating this document and for having resisted the federalist turn of the PPE, which has defended in this report to disempower the Council of its competences in foreign policy and communitize this policy, thus skipping the treaties, by the way. I believe that this is a necessary report because in foreign policy we jump from one crisis to another and there is very little reflection on the instruments of that foreign policy and on their faces: Who represents, who defines, who executes foreign policy? It is based on a rather confusing legal framework. I would say that in foreign policy there are many faces and many egos. And I would recommend letting Borrell work, who doesn't seem very concerned about the height of his armchair. I believe that improving those instruments of our foreign policy requires diplomacy that is truly European diplomacy. That idea of the Diplomatic School, evoked by Commissioner Timmermans, is an idea that came out of this Parliament. We need to improve our intelligence capacity in external crises. We need to create an intelligence flow from the national intelligence services to Brussels in order to be well informed and not act blindly. The INCENT must therefore be strengthened. European cultural diplomacy must be made which is not merely a mixture of national cultural diplomacy; a new position for the European Union must be sought in this multilateral world shaken up by Trump; The position of the European Union in the United Nations Security Council needs to be considered. To be very practical, how do you move from a French chair to a European Union chair in a few years?

Madam President, in this House we have had, in recent years, many opportunities to exercise the most justified criticism of the Turkish governorate; with its authorities, not with the country or with its admirable civil society. I've said it many times: Erdoğan is not Turkey and Turkey is not Erdoğan. It is to Turkey, to the nation, to society, to its people, that we must address today with empathy and closeness. The scale of the devastation is historic, surely only comparable to what happened in Haiti in 2010. And the same size should be the two answers: the domestic response and the European response. Our relationship, that of the European Union and that of the member countries, has been up to par. Within a few hours, the European civil protection mechanisms were put in place, some very symbolic ones that I want to highlight here, such as Greece's effort as Turkey's immediate neighbour. Now it is time to maintain that initial effort by creating the means to accompany reconstruction in safe conditions for the future. Turkey is not Haiti. Turkey is a country that exhibits its character as a regional actor and its enormous state capabilities. It is time to prove it, protecting its population and counting on European aid, humanitarian aid and, therefore, foreign to political considerations. There will be time for politics.

Madam President, everyone in this House has pointed to polarisation as the serious problem of Georgia's political system. A political system that seems to revolve only around one issue, which is the situation of Mr. Saakashvili. A situation about which it is necessary to remember that it was deliberately provoked. Everyone in this house recommended to Mr. Saakashvili not to enter the country illegally. Mr Saakashvili decided to do so in the middle of the electoral campaign, which has created a situation that now obliges those of us who recommend not to do so to try to resolve the situation. However, my group reiterates a position that we have already expressed. It is best to suspend the execution of the sentence so that Mr. Saakashvili is medically treated outside the country. For humanitarian reasons, yes, but also because that – we believe – would help to create a more standardised political agenda, less polarised and, surely, with more political energy dedicated to resuming the path of the European Union.