Speeches

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, unfortunately, the European Asylum Agency will not be a turning point in the management of migration. We all know that it was the European border countries that held back the closure of the negotiations on this regulation for years and we know that the negotiations were unblocked when the border countries were offered the postponement of the tasks to be carried out by the Agency: A typical Byzantine compromise of the European Union. But it is always a question of postponement. From December 2023, the Agency will have the possibility to assess the national asylum and reception systems, up to the commissionership of the State under strong migratory pressure. To be clear, Italy, Spain or Greece can already say goodbye to their national sovereignty over reception and asylum. We will continue to say it until exhaustion: The only way to alleviate migratory pressure is to reduce the number of arrivals and the only way to reduce arrivals is to stop illegal departures from countries of origin and transit. Then a common asylum system, with an adjoining Agency, would have reason to exist.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, the rise in the cost of energy is massacring businesses and households in Europe, but it is only the beginning if the environmental issue is not purged of the ideological violence of the left. The race in the dark towards the energy transition risks damaging both economic development and the environment. And there's worse: The Timmermans strategy risks damaging the political independence of the peoples of Europe. As we debate, Russia plays its game and communist China, which is the nation with the highest CO2 emissions in the world, builds new coal-fired power plants to resell energy to Europe at ever-increasing prices. And it is still China that has a monopoly on raw materials for the production of electric batteries for the storage of renewables. Colleagues, history teaches us that energy is a geopolitical factor too important and delicate to reduce it to a small topic of permanent electoral campaigning.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, there is an illegitimate political attempt to overthrow the conservative governments elected in Poland and Hungary, to replace them with socialist governments, and I am disappointed that the EPP lends itself to this design. In pursuing this attempt, every day we are witnessing an instrumentalisation of the concept of the rule of law. Today with this motion we even end up in the ridiculous: The law aims to protect the national media from the risk of falling into non-European hands, such as those of Russia or China, for example. Nothing wrong, but the ridiculous thing is that this law does not even exist, because the Polish Senate a few days ago rejected it, within a normal parliamentary dialectic like the one that normally takes place in all European democracies. Here, to those who would like to bend the freedom of the Polish people, I want to recall the words of a great Polish man, St. John Paul II: Trust is not won by force, it must be deserved.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, the European Council should have dealt with the fight against COVID-19, economic recovery and immigration, as requested by the Italian Prime Minister, but instead it dealt with a national law on sex education in schools, on combating paedophilia, not a law of the Orbán government, mind you, but a law of the Hungarian parliament, a free and democratic parliament that has made its choice, whether it is acceptable or not, on a matter that the Treaties do not assign to the European Union but to the national states. For this reason, today Hungary is threatened with not having the seven billion euros that it has requested and that are due to it within the Recovery Fund. The atrocious paradox is that, in the same European Council, it was not decided to help Italy and the Mediterranean nations struggling with the wave of migration, but it was decided to give another seven and a half billion euros to a real anti-democratic regime like that of Erdoğan in Turkey, to prevent migrants from reaching Germany where they happen to vote in a few months. This is a shame, I wanted to tell you.