Speeches

Madam President, I feel like I have been at the same show for years. Always the same speeches, the same illusions, the same mistakes. We are told about the European Pillar of Social Rights as a great step forward, but how can we talk about social rights when we let our factories and farmers die? You make big statements without a future while our workers and farmers fight to survive in the face of absurd standards and utterly unfair foreign competition. You pretend to defend the workers, but you forget those who feed and produce. You sign agreements that ruin our farms and turn a blind eye to the plight of those who keep our territories alive. The real pillar of social rights is not a text in Brussels. It is work, land, know-how, dignity. It is France that produces and Europe that protects, not the other way around. It is time to stop the illusions. The real pillar of social rights is work, it is production, it is the pride of a people that lives what it makes.

Mr President, as a Member of the European Parliament for Savoy, I see the damage of your policy in my valley in Maurienne. In Montricher, the Ferroglobe plant is stationary, as in Les Clavaux and Anglefort. It is 450 skilled workers who will be sacrificed, thrown like pawns, in the name of your boundless liberalism. The reality is simple: China floods our market at prices far below our production costs. This is economic plunder. And what are you doing? Nothing. You refuse to protect silicon metal, you refuse to protect our jobs, you dare to talk about sovereignty in your well-heated offices, but you let those who make it die, those who work, those who get up early. Your bureaucracy has become complicit in social and environmental dumping – always buying cheaper, always going further, and making more and more unemployed here. If Europe is not used to defend our workers and factories against this unfair competition, then that Europe will collapse. The Mauriennais, the Savoyards, the French have had enough of your denials. We will regain our sovereignty, and you will be held accountable.

Madam President, yes, there is an urgent need. When Shein sells child pornography dolls, when social networks lock our children into dangerous addictions, everyone understands that we must act. But a key question remains: Who decides? Brussels or states, families, parents? This report creates a digital majority at age 16, imposed through centralized identity verification. And there, three risks appear. First, that of a generalized surveillance tool. Then, the attack on the sovereignty of states and their educational choices. And finally, the marginalization of the role of parents, which technology will never replace. For us, the priority is clear: protect minors. This involves the responsibility of platforms, strengthening parental control and fighting against the algorithms that make our children captive. This report is not perfect and we will fight these excesses to defend our freedoms and sovereignty. Our responsibility is simple: protect our children immediately and without delay.

Mr President, in France, 13 million people suffer from a mental disorder. It's almost one in five French people. In our psychiatric hospitals, one in three doctors is vacant. A quarter of our departments no longer have a child psychiatrist. One in two young people with mental disorders is not followed. Adolescent hospitalizations exploded. Services close, families wait, and those who suffer sink into silence. Meanwhile, you will sprinkle and demand a binding European strategy, without vision, without results, without even an impact assessment. But what does that mean? Have you only consulted the professionals concerned? Of course not. With you, there is always more power for the bureaucracy and less freedom for the Member States. Once again, we refuse it. The mental health of our children, our families, our caregivers will never be managed from an office in Brussels. It is managed with doctors present, structures that hold and especially a nation that still believes in the value of human life.

Mr President, while this summer millions of Europeans were suffocating under unprecedented heatwaves, more than 42° in France, 46° in Spain, and a million hectares went up in smoke, today, finally, you are wondering what you could do. You disguise yourself as firefighters while you are the incendiary. Yes, heat rises because of CO2, but it's no coincidence. It's your treaties, your sickly obsession with the most polluting trade that blows up the thermometer. Your thermal strainer guidelines have already torpedoed the rental market. Your budget rules are strangling our public services. Rather than questioning this suicidal free trade, you are still looking to extend your powers to the heart of the daily life of the French, in housing and in health. So don't be surprised when our hospitals are saturated during heat waves. You have betrayed the Europe of nations. You've ruined our savings. You have suffocated our peoples. Let us fix what you broke.

Mr President, this summer, the lumpy bovine skin disease (DNC) ravaged the Pays de Savoie. While you were on vacation, more than 70 homes were declared, whole herds slaughtered, years of work destroyed, farmers in tears, helpless, seeing their healthy cows eliminated on the spot, on their own farm. Why? Because the state has chosen slaughter, while this disease is not deadly, is not transmitted between cattle and is not dangerous for humans. Our farmers can't do that anymore. They demand that we listen to them, that we put an end to this absurd massacre, and above all that they be compensated for their losses. Your European regulation justifies these slaughters when vaccination is enough, as confirmed by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). This is proof that these rules need to be revised, far from the realities on the ground. I ask you today to release sufficient emergency funds to support our farmers and ensure fair, prompt and full compensation. Because behind every cow slaughtered, families and territories are collapsing. Europe cannot betray those who feed it. To defend these farmers is to defend our identity and our future.

Mr President, they are not simulating, they are screaming in silence; they collapse in the toilet of a high school, in their workplace, in a bus; they cash in; they are isolated; They blame themselves. No, it is not in their heads. This is what millions of women with endometriosis are going through. Sometimes, yes, they end up giving up: to their jobs, to their motherhood, to their couple, even in some cases to their lives. It is an invisible but overwhelming suffering, which is met with a wall of indifference. For years, we have had the numbers: seven to ten years’ delay in diagnosis, no curative treatment, plus medical errors, guilt, isolation, etc. I myself tabled a motion for a resolution here two years ago calling for a European strategy, but you rejected it on the grounds that it was one disease among many. Today, Mr Froehlich echoes these findings in his resolution, and I welcome this initiative. But let's make it clear: nothing has changed. For more than a decade, you have been stacking statements, hollow commitments, forgotten relationships in drawers, but in real life – that of women, mothers, young girls – everyday life remains a journey of obstacles and humiliations. You can no longer keep turning a blind eye, and we will no longer be satisfied with a hashtag once a year. We call for concrete action. Enough words: It is time to act for all those who suffer in silence. It's time you took women's suffering seriously!

Mr President, who would dare to say that the European Union is a functioning institution? No crisis, whether migratory, health or economic, has been resolved by the Union's assistance. Worse still, on the Green Deal, on the rise of Islamism or on relocations, you have only been an accelerator of chaos. Like the USSR at the end of its life who thought to solve the problems of communism by more communism, you persist in believing that the Union will solve the failures of the Union and you are determined to impose on us your model that the people refuse. You still want to expand this crazy machine to countries like Turkey or Moldova, which share neither our culture nor our interests. What the French are waiting for is not more integration, it's more protection. And what history will remember is that your ideology will have destroyed the European idea much more surely than all your opponents combined.

Mr President, how can we tolerate, in this Chamber, the imposture of Rima Hassan, an elected official who, with every speech, diverts the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy for ideological and communitarian purposes? Not a word for France, not a word for Europe, only an obsession: import a conflict that is not ours on our soil. His anger is variable geometry. She staged herself as a victim after less than 24 hours in police custody, when children were massacred on 7 October. As for his so-called 8-hour hunger strike, it is an indecent provocation to the tragedy in Gaza. But the most worrying thing is the silence or even complacency of too many elected representatives in this Chamber. The European Union must not be the voice of those who incite hatred. It must once again become a voice of peace, firmness and clarity. Let's find the course, let's find the voice of France.

Mr. Speaker, the voice that rises to accuse often echoes one's own guilt. Today, you drape yourself in beautiful intentions about mental health at work, but the truth is that you are primarily responsible for the malaise you claim to be fighting. You have broken our industries, sacrificed our jobs on the altar of a savage globalization. You have left our farmers and workers in unfair competition with your free trade agreements. Do you really want to talk about workplace wellness and mental health when a farmer commits suicide every other day? If you really want to improve the mental health of Europeans, stop talking and start acting, protect our jobs, defend our farmers, support our businesses. Give back to the peoples their sovereignty, their prosperity and their right to a future. That's where the real dignity is, that's where the real answer is. That is what the Europeans expect of you.

Madam President, today justice is being used as a political weapon. The trial of Marine Le Pen, two years before the presidential election, is not neutral. It does not aim at truth, it does not aim at justice: It aims to silence the first political opponent. Requisitions are disproportionate. The calendar speaks for itself. Behind all this, there is the hand of Brussels, always ready to attack those who defend their people. Can we still talk about democracy when we try to dismiss a candidate through the courts rather than through the voice of the people? It is not just a woman, but 13 million French people. This is not a first: in Romania, a few weeks before the presidential election, the same methods were used to disqualify the national opposition. Today, this scenario is repeated in France. This is a serious, dangerous drift, a power that is afraid of losing and that uses justice to protect itself. But the French are not fooled. We will defend Marine Le Pen, we will defend democracy and we will give the floor to the people. Because if the European Union continues to trample on fundamental freedoms, then yes, it will collapse and it will have looked for it.

Madam President, European industry is dying before our eyes, and it is not an accident: it is a political choice. Decades of free trade and submission to foreign interests have destroyed our factories, sacrificed our workers and ruined our territories. Now you want us to believe that your few adjustments will be enough to repair the damage? Too late, too little: you are only doing a communication operation to hide your responsibility in this shipwreck. The ban on combustion engines by 2035 is a madness that threatens millions of jobs, destroys our industry and, worse still, penalises the most modest, those who do not live in big cities, and whose car is not a luxury but a necessity. Who can believe that they will have all the means to buy an overpriced electric vehicle? Who can believe that infrastructure will follow? So today, ladies and gentlemen, it is clear that: small measures will not be enough, and postponing the ban on thermal engines is far from enough. Let's stop with this punitive ecology! Let's stop with this delusional ideology! A country without industry is a country without a future. Europe must defend its peoples, not sacrifice them.

Madam President, you are striving to impose a dogmatic vision inherited from Robert Mundell, who wanted a Europe without borders, where workers and capital are interchangeable, in defiance of peoples and nations. With this in mind, you dream of an Erasmus of work. Today, again, you want to standardize vocational education and training, crushing the sovereignty of States. You don't have to impose choices on us that people have never validated. You say you care about workers, but you organize their precariousness in the name of unlimited competition. European countries do not need a bureaucracy that sells off their interests under the guise of mobility. They need work, reindustrialization, protection and not a new lever to accelerate immigration and devalue wages. France is not intended to be a market under the rule of the strongest, but a nation that protects its workers and prepares its future according to its own choices. The future of our people does not belong to you, it belongs to the French.

Mr President, once again you claim to have found the miracle solution to the shortage of carers. But you're the one who caused this crisis. For years, your policies of fiscal restraint have strangled our health systems. Result: In France, a 26-year-old woman died in an emergency room due to lack of care. And your answer is always the same: Bring in foreign caregivers as if our nations were just reservoirs of labor. But it is not up to Brussels to decide the future of our hospitals. What is needed is a real national plan, to train more doctors, to restore this profession to its nobility, to free the hospital from the bureaucracy that suffocates it and to guarantee every Frenchman the fundamental right to be treated with dignity wherever he lives. We do not want health to become a variable for adjusting your policies. France will decide sovereignly, with its caregivers and for its patients, because these are not numbers, but lives.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, you have recently taken up the issue of disability, making many declarations and promises as usual. But behind your fine speeches, where are the deeds? Where is the audit of the resources actually mobilised? Where is the assessment of what is meant to improve the lives of people with disabilities? Not a structural reform, not a concrete step forward, nothing. Pious wishes, which also exclude people with invisible disabilities, who nevertheless represent 80% of people with disabilities. In the Committee on Employment, you excluded our group from the discussions and disregarded our proposals for people with disabilities. This is your conception of democracy: Ignore or censor those who dare to contradict you. However, our commitment is sincere, like Mr Szekeres, Paralympic champion and elected member of our group, who knows the challenges of disability better than anyone else. I know in my flesh what this suffering means, and it is precisely because I know it that I will not let your amateurism...

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, the anger of the peoples of Europe is rising every day. Everywhere desperate farmers, workers and citizens are fighting to survive. And what do they get from you? Contempt, indifference and decisions that abandon them. And here in this Chamber, you are no longer even pretending to respect democracy. You remove elected officials, lock down debates and trample on the voices of the people. The deputies of the National Rally, whether you like it or not, were elected by the people. But here, everything is done to silence us. In the Committee on Women's Rights, my colleague Mathilde Androuët has had her amendments deleted on totally bogus pretexts. In the Committee on Employment, our group has been excluded from discussions on initiatives that are crucial for people with disabilities. Why? Because you're obsessed with your famous cordon sanitaire. But what is the purpose of this cordon sanitaire? Protecting your power? To give you a good conscience? Open your eyes! By refusing to listen, you are not only depriving our voters of their voices, you are also leaving millions of people suffering. You refuse to listen to an elected member of our group, Mr Szekeres, Paralympic foil champion, who is concerned about disability. At the beginning of my mandate, I started working on the disability of deaf and hard of hearing people. More than 55 million people in Europe suffer from loneliness and expect concrete results. They are the forgotten ones in all your debates on disability. Some associations came to talk to you, but it was you who remained deaf to their call. You prefer to ignore them, as you ignore us, but we will not give up. Since we are the only ones who make their voices heard, we will continue until you take into account their suffering, because people with disabilities deserve better than your political games and indifference.

Mr President, we are debating the situation of women politicians in countries around the European Union and the violence aimed at silencing women. But how can we demand the exemplarity of others when, in France, we are confronted with the rise of Islamism and the radicalisation of the left? I was cowardly attacked in a market. Assaulted by two men, one of whom was already guilty of 15 convictions for violence. This aggression was compounded by equally unbearable violence: that of the far left, which did not hesitate to support and applaud my aggressor. These activists who claim to be defenders of the oppressed actually turn out to be the enemies of democracy and women when they refuse to be silent. The far left is now the face of hatred, cowardice and intimidation. Its supporters applaud violence when it serves their ideology and reverses roles, turning aggressors into heroes and victims into perpetrators. They are the real enemies of women, those who want to drive us out of public space through fear, violence and contempt. No woman should be silenced. To remain silent in the face of this violence is to capitulate, and we will never capitulate!

Mr President, tomorrow morning, the Rural Coordination will come to demonstrate in front of the doors of this Parliament, like so many farmers all over France. Again, you will refuse to listen, understand and question your deadly ideology: free trade at all costs, which strangles our farmers, ruins our territories and sacrifices our sovereignty. Yet my political family has for years denounced treaties, such as Mercosur, which only impoverish us. If you still don't listen to us, at least listen to the suffering of our farmers who kill themselves every other day. And out of pity: Don't add to your deafness the outrage of forcing your text through. Stop killing our farmers, these guardians of our territories, these artisans of our identity, this priceless wealth for France. Listen to them at last, for they are the living soul of our country.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to see that the European Union is finally addressing the crises it has itself created. Better late than never, but let's be clear: on the automobile as on the rest, you are only repairing the damage you have caused, leaving our economies on their knees and our industrial flagships at the edge of the abyss. Look at the 3,000 employees of Audi Brussels, victims of your relocations, your environmental obsessions and your fanatical openness to free trade. You have invited Eastern Europe, South Korea and China to compete with our industries with totally unequal rules: So our industry had no chance. Finally, you dealt the fatal blow by forcing our manufacturers to follow your obsession with the electric car. Even Renault told you: Your goals are delusional. Your 36% late customs protection against China won't change that. So, in the face of this disaster, do not pretend to want to protect us from the misfortunes for which you alone are responsible.

Madam President, at the beginning of this term of office, it would be tempting to turn the page on the past and pretend to start from scratch. However, I remind you of the commitments made at the end of the previous mandate regarding European funding paid to Islamist organizations such as Islamic Relief, which received more than 40 million euros of European funds through Erasmus+. 40 million euros of taxpayers' money for an organization that transferred millions of dollars to Hamas. And as if that were not enough, according to the German government, the same organisation has very strong ties with the Muslim Brotherhood. You promised an investigation through the German National Agency. Was it conducted? European citizens have a right to know whether their money finances Islamism, which attacks their values and security. No cent of Europeans' money should be used to finance the enemies of our nations. We demand clear answers and immediate action.

Madam President, you want to create a body allegedly composed of experts to set ethical standards. Your proposal is not only absurd, but also totally useless. Once again, standards and procedures, ever more standards, ever more procedures, ever more technocrats for, in the end, always the same result: a complete lack of efficiency. Before thinking about inventing new structures, why not simply apply the elementary ethical rules? What are you doing about Eva Kaïli, a socialist with whom the Belgian police discovered suitcases of banknotes from Qatar and who continues to sit in Parliament? What do you do when Ursula von der Leyen concludes a €35 billion contract for COVID-19 vaccines via SMS? What do you do when the European Commission says that freedom lies in the hijab, while giving the floor to Islamist associations linked to the Muslim Brotherhood? Nothing, absolutely nothing. So forget your useless organs and be less forgiving of corrupt policies that manipulate, steal and betray the European people.

Mr. Speaker, on Thursday, April 4, a fifteen-year-old was murdered, beaten and left on the ground in front of his college gate. Two days later, 14-year-old Samara was lynched to the point of falling into a coma because she refused to wear the Islamic veil. It was last week. On Monday, a thirteen-year-old girl was assaulted by four boys for failing to respect Ramadan. These crimes did not arrive in Syria or Afghanistan, but in France, at a school in the Republic, the same Republic where teachers are threatened with death on a daily basis in the name of Allah. The same school where Samuel Paty and Dominique Bernard died. This year, 4 512 incidents of violence against secularism were recorded by the National Education Office. How many more victims will it take for you to open your eyes? How many more Lola, Mégane, Thomas, Victorine will it take for you to realise that our societies are cracking under violence, the result of uncontrolled immigration? You're responsible. You organise immigration through projects like the European Migration Pact and you have to answer for your decisions.

Madam President, Gandhi said: “One can judge the greatness of a nation and its moral progress by how it treats its animals.” There is still much to be done on animal welfare to live up to this quote. The European legislation governing slaughter lays down as a principle the stunning of animals before they are killed in order to prevent them from suffering. This is a good thing, but the problem is that this text provides for an exception for ritual slaughter, an exception that has become the rule, since, according to the latest report of the General Council for Food, Agriculture and Rural Areas, 51% of the slaughter carried out in France is ritual slaughter. In some territories in France, you do not even have a choice, since you no longer have a conventional slaughterhouse for reasons of simplifying tasks or reducing costs. Lack of traceability also makes it impossible to know whether meat from animal welfare is consumed or not. Ritual slaughter is an organised slaughter of absolute cruelty from another time, which has no place in our Western societies and civilisation. So it is high time to banish these barbaric and bloodthirsty, medieval exceptions to worship, which must not be above our values and above animal suffering.