Speeches

... Resolution on violence against journalism in Mexico, which has included other victims of violence. We could have extended the list indefinitely because the brutal violence that is spreading throughout Mexico is absolutely incredible and reminds us of the most brutal situations in some other countries, where these have already directly collapsed law and order. Journalism has a special character there, because although we have victims - as I say - throughout the Mexican geography and, in some States and organized crime, largely allied with the public authorities, has taken effective power and directly kills anyone who opposes or bothers them, journalists are a special case because they are the object of direct harassment, of accusations by the authorities in the capital. And they are direct - and this is a rather unheard of case in a democracy - on the part of the President of the Republic. The direct, personalised accusations made by President López Obrador against the press in Mexico are absolutely – as I say – unheard of and should be denounced by all; We must urge this head of state to return to a reasonable course of action to protect journalists, to search for those responsible for the many murders, 96% of which have not been clarified, to look for those responsible and not to pour more gasoline on what is a great pyre in which the freedoms of Mexicans are consumed. It cannot be that Mexico falls into the same spiral, with the same rhetoric, that Venezuela is in.

Madam President, the 8th General Union Environment Action Programme is not just an example of how the green ideology, which dominates the whole of Parliament, despises science, the reality of the market and the interests of the European citizen; In the current circumstances of a Europe at war, it is a real insult. Neither COVID nor Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has allowed the European Commission to critically review its Green Deal and recognise that priorities need to change radically. Socialist Vice President Timmermans and many others intend, with their ecological and climatic obsessions, to continue as if nothing were happening on this continent, which is practically on fire. It is terrible that the big parties do not dare to oppose the radicals of fanatical and irresponsible environmentalism. We are facing a drama that demands that reality be imposed on ideological whims. This programme aims to be the framework for sustainable development, the Green Deal and the 2030 Agenda. The goals are bad, ideological and false. The text is very bad too and Parliament's position is almost worse. In a dramatic moment in which people are already dying in Europe because of the cold, because of energy poverty, in which the quality of life of Europeans has sunk because of an absolutely wrong policy, because of a senseless dependence on Russian fuels that the European Union has increased, and with solutions to renewables that are insufficient or that have directly failed, we see how they speak of a climate-neutral, sustainable, but non-toxic, resilient, competitive and circular economy in a fair, equitable and inclusive way. Reality demands an end to the ideological dreams of the 2030 Agenda and the Green Deal. Please, reality for everyone.

Madam President, Europe is now facing a total crisis, a crisis in which it will decide its fate. This is not an invented crisis, like the alarms and catastrophes that the European Union has invented to feed its ideological questions over the last decades and invent priorities that went behind the backs of the European population. We are facing an infinite tragedy, an aggression; and the heroism of the Ukrainians has led us to really see what they are, what reality is and what is the necessary change of priorities that Europe must make. From here, I send a strong solidarity embrace both to the heroic Ukrainians, who defend their homeland, and to the Russians who are repressed under Putin's tyranny, to the Belarusians and to all countries, and especially to Poland, which, as vexed as it has been in recent years by the European Union, is showing infinite generosity and which will have to be helped in relation to those millions of refugees who are fleeing that barbaric offensive of President Putin.

Madam President, weakness produces monsters and European weakness, now added to the chaos and weakness of the current US government, has invited Putin to show his worst face. We already had the first chapter of this drama under Obama, when he let himself be run over by his red lines in Syria and we had, as a direct consequence, Crimea. Weakness, as I say, produces monsters and Putin must be stopped where he is. Their threat is not to Ukraine alone. Its threat is to the whole of Europe and, above all, to the whole of Eastern Europe: Poland, Lithuania, the entire Baltic Sea, Bulgaria and Romania. Putin must be told that he cannot threaten countries that are internationally recognized, one of which has him busy at the moment. And, of course, it cannot play with European favors, such as Nord Stream, which must be suspended immediately.

Mr President, prices, which led to serious unrest throughout the country, were crushed with relentless force and foreign intervention by Russian forces. President Tokayev called for shooting to kill protesters and Russian forces were also relentless. So, we don't really have the death toll and, of course, we know that, not coincidentally, there are many opposition activists among them. We do not know whether these riots have been used in internal family wars in the regime; What we do know is, on the one hand, that the opposition has been crushed and, on the other hand, we also know, we know very well, that the Russians have arrived, that the Russians have created a very important precedent of intervention in a foreign country to supposedly restore calm, as they once did under the Soviet regime. In that sense, at this time when we have the crisis in Ukraine, it is really worrying that the European Union did not exist, that Borrell did not exist, once again, for the important issues.

Madam President, congratulations, President Macron, you have managed to convince many millions of Europeans now that the Europe they want is the opposite of yours, to this one that comes with that arrogance, with that arrogance, to the European Parliament, which abuses the time massively to campaign French elections in Parliament, as it has done in this absolutely unusual response of 39 minutes. It turns out that Europe is in a dramatic situation, with an explicit military threat from the east of the European Union, and we have Poland directly threatened along with Ukraine. And you do not come here to defend the borders, to defend Poland, but you come here to scold everyone. Everyone's to blame. Poland and Hungary are very much to blame, you say, when you are implementing measures under the pretext of COVID that look like Chinese measures. And when the violence you exert against the yellow vests and other protesters is Chinese as well. These are violations of the rule of law, not what you are using for your ideological war against Poland and Hungary. His presence here is unheard of, as he has spoken: He has not said a word about the family, nor a word about the birth rate, about that problem, nor about the enormous economic problems that exist for the families beset by the pandemic. And does it turn out that the right to abortion is your priority? Man, for God's sake!... (The Chair took the floor from the speaker).

Madam President, in a walled cell to which water is poured from the ceiling so that it is always wet, they are slowly killing the political prisoner, sick and dying, who is José Daniel Ferrer. In the prison of Quivicán is Roberto Pérez Fonseca, 38, sentenced to ten years on false charges. In fact, he, like so many of the 600 Cubans who are in prison and who are being sentenced to long prison terms, are doing so because they left on July 11 in a cry for freedom to say Enough now! And yet, here it was interpreted, by the Foreign Service led by Mr. Borrell, that they came out because of the shortage of a series of articles that was due to Mr. Trump's sanctions. To that degree of manipulation we have come here with this obsession of the High Representative and his team to defend the narco-communist dictatorships of Ibero-America and, especially, the Cuban one. So much so that in Ibero-America the European Union is already considered complicit and whitewashing of these dictatorships, and the Cuban Sakharov prizes have said that they prefer to return the prizes to see this complicit passivity and this shameful silence on the part of Mr Borrell and his team and the Commission. There's nothing going on, they're not doing anything. I'm going to congratulate everyone on Christmas. I really hope that especially political prisoners know that there is hope and that the European Union regains the moral muscle to fight for a free Cuba, for a free Bolivia, for a free Nicaragua and for a free Venezuela.

Mr President, this point of order is because we have just heard the words of Mrs Tsijanóuskaya from Belarus. We are facing the greatest aggression at the moment, not only against the people of Belarus themselves, but an unprecedented aggression against the borders of the European Union, against Poland. We are seeing aggression at our borders and it turns out that the High Representative for the European Union's foreign policy is not here. Mr. Borrell is hardly ever where he should be. Mr Borrell has sent a mission to Venezuela, in which he has only ridiculed and damaged the credibility of the European Union in a very serious way, but, above all, at this moment of aggression against the European Union and Poland, the borders of Poland, Mr Borrell is absent and we do not have him. That shouldn't be so. And I report it here.

Mr President, the Glasgow Summit has given us very revealing images, such as the jamming of the airport terminal with the private planes of the most reputable climate gurus, which say that the worker's tractors and vans pollute a lot; or the teenage Greta, with such scientific arguments typical of a priestess of science who does not go to school, screaming at the authorities to shove the weather up her ass, literally. Beyond the anecdotal, the substance is that there has been no talk of what is important, that is, the concerns of citizens and small businesses in the face of energy poverty, rising costs or the rural exodus. That hasn't been on the agenda. In Spain, thermal power plants are flying and now they are importing coal from Indonesia, and insolvencies in Spain are going to be the highest in the world. The final declaration of the Summit and the different agreements reached highlight the enormous distance between the EU's green fantasies and the productive and economic reality of our main trading partners and competitors. The European Union is a fictional leader. His claim to be an example to be followed by countries such as China or India on the green road map has failed miserably. A bit of a brake, please, on ideological ambitions that cause a lot of damage to the common European and little or no benefit to anyone.

Madam President, some may not know that Sri Lanka managed to get ahead of the European Commission as a major global reference for environmentalism, with its Farm to Fork Strategy. His Government decided to suddenly eliminate all pesticides and become the first country in the world with 100% of its agroecological production; This decision received unanimous and enthusiastic applause from the European Union, the United Nations and even FAO. Today, this country is facing an unprecedented food crisis: production has fallen by 50%, food prices have skyrocketed and ration cards have been distributed. A miscalculated populist decision has led the country to food collapse: Sri Lanka has painfully understood that food is not at stake. What happened in that country should make us reflect on the need to analyse in depth the impact of some of the star measures of the European Commission, such as the reduction of 50% of pesticides, the withdrawal of production of 10% of the area or the objective of 25% of the agricultural area dedicated to organic farming. There are follow-up studies and reports on the impact of the Farm to Fork Strategy and we should be concerned that everyone agrees that it is not based on sound and scientific criteria. The debate is going to intensify now in the coming months and I hope that the European Commission will be able to modulate all this, bring realism into the situation, see the fundamental role of livestock and producers and, as I say, rationalize a very dangerous process.

Madam President, it is very true that there is massive disinformation on social networks, it is very true that there are a number of States that have turned networks into a weapon widely used to exert influence and damage enemies and undermine democracies, but it is also very true that the disinformation of some in the networks is used as a pretext by certain forces, the owners of the networks and related political forces, to exercise systematic censorship, always with sectarianism and Manichaeism and always in the same direction: against conservative and national forces. I am glad to hear now that you want to break the monopolies, but right now the monopolies are all acting in the same direction. The biggest disinformation in the past four years in the world has not only been on networks, but on television and in the media, and journalists across Europe and the United States have been part of it: This is Trump's alleged conspiracy with Russia, totally false. Collusion, collusion! It was false, and right here they echoed it and nobody has denied it, and the biggest scandal that has been censored in the networks have been the depraved habits of Biden's son and the concealment by his father, which could have changed the elections and the results and at least certain votes; has never been in the networks, precisely because of this censorship: That's where we have to look at what's going on in these networks that we're talking about.

Madam President, today this Parliament has the possibility of really repairing an immense and very long affront that has been committed against a people, a subjugated people, a people that has been crushed, tortured for sixty-three years, to whom they have taken away all rights, to whom they have made in large part to throw themselves into the sea, to be devoured by sharks, to have a large part of the population out in exile, and that is still there, as an absolutely intolerable example of what has been, on the one hand, condescension and, on the other hand, the direct complicity of the democracies that have allowed this anomaly, this absolute anomaly that is Cuba, to continue there and to be maintained. The time has come to denounce an Agreement that was an unfair Agreement when it was made and that is absolutely unbearable today, when, five years later, we all know that they do not have the slightest intention of fulfilling anything that it puts and that for the only thing that serves is to subsidize the communist mafia that runs that party, which lives with a life of privileges and luxuries while having the country - which was the fourth richest country in America - prostrate in destitution, at the same level as Haiti and that its province, Venezuela, that they invaded with the agreement with Chavez and that they have turned into another well of misery, torture and pain. Because, with its complicities, Cuba not only crushes its own, its own people, Cuba is also promoting misery, pain, destabilization and subversion throughout the continent. It is time to say that we must apply the clause that suspends that Agreement, which, as I say, has only brought privileges, greater privileges and more money for the mafia that governs Cuba at this time. We must tell the High Representative and a number of parties that continue to support this dictatorship here that the position they have adopted after 11 July, when Cubans took to the streets to defend their dignity, their right to freedom, their right to democracy – as we all have and as we demand for ourselves – is intolerable, while some claim that Cuba remains a socialist reserve for tourism – the tourism of the ideal – a series of characters from the European intellectual left. That's an embarrassment and it has to end. Therefore, please vote in favor of this resolution so that some justice is finally done with the Cubans.

Madam President, this is a great report, Mrs Vautmans' report, which really, for the first time in this House - perhaps for the first time in the European Union - presents an overview of a great threat to our civilisation, a great threat to our security as China is at the moment. We are at the end of an immense misunderstanding that began forty years ago, when we all thought that the approach to capitalism was going to make China a slowly becoming more tolerant, increasingly plural and increasingly open country. It was the opposite. Right now, we've been ten years with a leader who has really become a dictator like only Mao was, and with a hardening of the situation inside China. China's attitudes outside of there are increasingly aggressive and more threatening. The internal repression is immense and the attitude towards the rest of the world is absolutely overwhelming and there is a bullying that threatens us and tries to intimidate us all. So we have to have a very, very clear concept of what China is at the moment. We have to have a very clear concept that we have to have a global and general policy towards it. And we have to have the exact opposite of what has been wanted with those temptations of new investment agreements. We have to have a policy of resistance against an immense aggression that is thrown at us.

Mr President, it is difficult to say whether it is possible for the European Union to have normalised relations with Vladimir Putin's Russia, and yet we have to try. This report says many things and very hard and very true. We have been demonstrating for 20 years that Putin is unreliable. It does not respect international law, conventions or, of course, human rights, inside or outside Russia: from the killings of opposition members or the imprisonment of Navalny to the invasion and annexation of Crimea; from disinformation operations with Puigdemont and Catalan separatists to aggressions against Ukraine or provocations to the Baltic. There are many obstacles, currently insurmountable, that put President Putin in relations that could be and should be much more intense and beneficial for both parties. The European Union must be firm and united against Putin's Russia. For this reason, they are condemnable initiatives that divide, such as the selfish German adventure of the North Stream II. At the same time, the European Union must insist on that cooperation with Russia, because Russia will remain there when Putin ends, that Russia whose future cannot be to become the reserve of raw materials for China. We need in Russia a cooperator for the future and somehow we have to do it.

Mr President, when we are going to talk about the Commission's work programme for 2022, we learn that the Commission is considering the pointlessness of suspending the recovery fund plan for Hungary. In this past year the pandemic has led many governments to act in an authoritarian, arbitrary and even illegal way. There we have the Spanish government, social-communist, which has really skipped all the rules and has been imposing perfectly illegal states of alarm, and continues with its blow to end the monarchy and democracy in Spain. But in the Commission you seem to imitate this now, and we are moving towards absolute illegalities. In no treaty is it written that the European Commission or any other country has any kind of competence over education in Hungary. And what this is about is, it seems, crushing all other countries so that ideologically they have to go the same way as the social democratic, leftist and globalist majority. We're really seeing unusual things. You have every right to take your children wherever you want, but every country has its right. And the resolution that most groups are trying to present to Parliament now only oozes hatred, which you attribute to others. It is a Resolution full of hatred, made by a person with a background, with hatred and, in addition, perfectly incapacitated to make that type of text. And to that person you have precisely given that resolution. It's hate, gentlemen.

Madam President, some are now holding their hands to their heads with the atrocities and arrests that are taking place in Nicaragua, but the truth is that it was seen to be coming for a long time, because the regime chaired by Daniel Ortega has followed the same script as Venezuela. It comes with elections to power, rallied by left-wing forces around the world, including European ones, and, from there, democracy is systematically dismantled, with enabling laws that empty constitutional guarantees of all content. And now Ortega detains, one after another, the leaders of the opposition, from Cristiana Chamorro to the last, Lesther Alemán, and four others, to make it clear that the November elections will be only a farce for their continuity. That happened in Venezuela and that's happening in Nicaragua. And it can only happen because they have the support and intervention of the one who always acts in this sinister totalitarian clan of the São Paulo Forum, which is Cuba; Yes, Cuba, that criminal dictatorship subsidized by the European Union and protected by the High Representative, Josep Borrell, is also in Nicaragua. Ortega is not a Martian who came to take power in this country; He is a socialist brought to power by socialists and communists from all over America and Europe. And, above all, he is a protégé of Cuba and the São Paulo Forum, with close ties to the Spanish Government and also to the party of Mr. Josep Borrell ⁇ the Spanish Socialist Workers Party ⁇ . Cuba is a dictatorship that subsidizes and protects this European Union in an unprecedented way. We are talking here about condemning a dictatorship, when we know that all those who help this dictatorship ⁇ many of them ⁇ are receiving millions of euros from the European Union. And I'm referring right now to Havana. Less hypocrisy, more sanctions on Nicaragua, of course, more sanctions on Venezuela, but sanctions and very serious sanctions on Cuba as well, Mr. Borrell.