What Patricia spoke about.

Madam President, last Thursday, I was invited to attend the annual congress of France Grandes Cultures in Provins, in the midst of the beet sector crisis. The brutal ban on the use of neonicotinoids for beet seed coating has resulted in a brutal and total ban on this indispensable pesticide. All the professionals I met were unanimous: the risk of collapse of the entire beet sector in France is real. While you ban the use of certain plant protection products in our country, why do you allow imports from the countries that use them? Why, when we talk about the importance of agricultural self-sufficiency and independence, do you kill French agriculture with directives and decrees? Your stigmatization of our farmers is unbearable, just as your submission to the globalist model is destructive. For us, our farmers are the beating hearts of our countryside, the pillars of the nation and the guarantors of high quality products on the plates of French people, as in those of consumers who have the chance to consume French products around the world.

Commissioner, Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, here in this gallery, I would like to remind you that European citizenship does not exist and will never exist. Citizenship is linked to a nation. Europe is not a nation and therefore European citizenship cannot and will never exist. It is a purely ideological construct: the European Union is made up of the citizens of the different nations that make it up. Instead of learning from the growing protests of the peoples of Europe against the empire you have created, you are moving forward with arrogance and contempt in your integration project. Your project will eventually shatter on the reality of the peoples, because our thirst for freedom will eventually triumph. The peoples are not interchangeable, nor can they be integrated into your empire by an artificial "European citizenship". Empires are only parentheses in the history of peoples and our European Alliance of Nations is the future.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I am elected from France, and more specifically from the Somme, in Picardy, France's first beet-growing region. Here, in this forum, I want to speak for tens of thousands of French farmers, and in reality for an entire sector that risks dying from a disproportionate decision and, I believe, totally unsuited to the ecological goal pursued. The European Court of Justice’s decision to impose on beetroots the immediate, outright removal of neonicotinoids in the Member States is unheard of in brutality. Insecticides are essential to protect beet crops from aphid attacks. You cannot ignore that the Macron government’s decision to impose the EU decision will lead to the proliferation of aphids, the fall in beet yields and, consequently, the bankruptcy of farms. Instead of giving researchers and farmers time to find alternative treatment, the French Minister of Agriculture announced that he was giving in to the Brussels injunctions, which were disastrous for the French beet sector. The French government prefers to abandon farmers in the middle of the countryside rather than displease its friends in the European Union. You allow them to sell even more sugar today, including South American cane sugar. (The President withdrew the floor to the speaker.)

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, some of the artisan bakers from Crotoy and Abbeville whom I met last week have seen their electricity bills increase fivefold, and 80% of them fear bankruptcy. France, for a very long time, has been able to guarantee clean and cheap energy for its people and its companies. But, at the instigation of the European Commission, instead of strengthening its nuclear know-how, it has been drawn into energy transition programmes, particularly wind energy, neglecting research and development in its own field of excellence and sacrificing its energy sovereignty. The coup de grace is carried out today by the European energy market, which pairs the price of electricity with the price of gas. With the increase in the price of gas, an unprecedented surge in the price of electricity in France is taking place in a completely artificial way. We, the elected representatives of the Rassemblement National, demand without delay the revision of the rules and a general reduction of VAT on essential materials. France would no longer be France without the baguette, and alongside Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella all the elected representatives of our movement testify their infallible support to the artisan bakers of France to ensure the sustainability of their profession, true icon of France. Our support to you, my dear bakery craftsmen friends (The President withdrew the floor to the speaker)

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, we are all Members of the European Parliament splattered by a corruption scandal of an unprecedented scale, with practices worthy of the most shabbyly corrupt banana republics. A multitude of investigations are ongoing, but there are also, let us remember, billions of euros of public money that have been put into the manufacture of vaccines. This is also a matter of suspicion of financial influence on the part of pharmaceutical lobbies. Doubt must be removed as to the conditions under which pharmaceutical contracts were negotiated and awarded. But where is OLAF, the European Anti-Fraud Office? Why has it not yet taken up the task of investigating the conditions of purchase of vaccines, when that would seem to be its role? Why is the Belgian police investigating the alleged corruption of MEPs by Qatar? These two alleged scandals, I would point out, take place in the deafening silence of Parliament's internal control bodies. The question we are asked is: Why?

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, you are once again here in the moral register. Like a new church that wants to impose itself with priests, masses and oaths. The new world looks at you with irony. Nations have their histories, states have their constraints, individuals have their affections – territorial, family and biological. Political action calls for realism. This does not mean that we should not defend law or democracy. But your logic makes our countries land in Africa, in Asia, even in friendly countries. You're just isolating yourself. And you maintain an inappropriate sense of the anachronistic arrogance of the West.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to return to the last episode of the migration crisis that is shaking our continent: the berthing of a boat, the Ocean Viking, on the French coast with 234 illegal migrants on board. We learn tonight that more than 95% of them have vanished. The NGO SOS Méditerranée hides behind a humanitarian principle, rescue at sea, in reality a political operation to put pressure on states and speed up the reception of migrants on the European continent. A policy that is also very close to your heart. These increasingly numerous and brazen NGO interventions encourage migrants to embark on immigration routes, speed up and facilitate the business of mafia smugglers. There are currently 1.2 billion people living in Africa. By 2050, this figure will at least double. Even in the face of this number, the reality and the opposition of the peoples of Europe, your disastrous Pact on Immigration and Asylum will continue to encourage and facilitate such migration. Because for you, immigration is not a problem, but your project. Here in the European Parliament, alongside Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen, we will continue to oppose and expose your sinister intentions.

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, you are always very quick to praise the advantages of free movement, of the Schengen area, but much more discreet when it comes to admitting the link with infringements, or even with the tragedies linked to the absence of border controls. All kinds of criminal, terrorist and mafia networks, as well as traffickers of all kinds benefit from free movement between countries and therefore between jurisdictions. And perhaps the most dramatic consequence is the arrival, settlement and movement of illegal migrants, who are becoming more and more numerous on the European continent. In reality, the Schengen area, which should be a protected area of free movement, is an area of free movement open to all winds. Your proposals to extend the Schengen area today to Romania and Bulgaria, tomorrow to the Balkans, from 27 to 30 or even 36 Member States, with a push towards the East, as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared last Saturday, testify to your stubbornness in advancing your ideological project. After your cover-up in 2005, your refusal to hold a referendum since then on the subject of the future of Europe confirms your imperialist ambitions and your contempt for the will of the peoples, which you have decided to ignore.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to take this opportunity to denounce a practice which seems to me to be part of a flat-rate budget. I fully appreciate the harshness of this term, but it does not come to mind. The budget is at the service of residents, economic sectors, local and regional authorities and, yes, at the service of the future. You are diverting this act by turning the European budget into a means of political pressure on the states. You are not conducting a fiscal policy, but you are waging an ideological war against the opponents of your political vision. Financial blackmail against Hungary proceeds from this questionable method. And what about Mrs von der Leyen's threats to the Italians on the eve of their election when she warns: If you vote badly, you could be suspended from receiving EU funds. Your desperately authoritarian and imperialist manoeuvres will not stop the march that has taken place all over Europe. On the contrary, it is accelerating. Nothing will stop the peoples of Europe’s free nations from taking their destiny into their own hands.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, this evening your attitude towards Frontex has the merit of clarity. The brutal change of management and the defamation campaign against the agency are eloquent. For a long time, we have been told that Frontex is a border guard agency of Europe. We have always expressed our reservations and your attitude today removes all doubt. Schengen, which should be a protected area of free movement, is actually an area of free movement open to all winds. For you, immigration is not a problem, it is your project. We will be able to inform the peoples of Europe, who are no longer able to cope with the immigration that you are subjecting them to.

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, once again the government of a Member State of the European Union is at the heart of a scandal. Illegal taking of interests seems to have become common practice among a large caste of political leaders who believe themselves to be above the law and invested with a quasi-religious ideology. People’s contempt is growing at the same time. Men are reduced to being interchangeable variables of production and consumption. At a time when the EU is so quick to criticise, or even condemn, recalcitrants to its ‘immigrationist’ ideology or ‘woke’ imperialism. Oddly enough, when it comes to one of his own, a deafening silence reigns in the corridors and press rooms of these pompous institutions. When fundamental rights are interpreted according to the quality of people, when the function of elected institutions and legitimate representatives of peoples is limited to commenting on decisions taken in soft offices with soundproof doors, democracy is threatened. The peoples are not fooled by this facade democracy. Hungary, Sweden, Italy: so many recent examples, around us, of peoples who have started the democratic surge against the Brussels imperialist caste and their complicit representatives in national parliaments. The Europe of tomorrow will be the Europe of free peoples and sovereign nations. We are experiencing the change of that era, so exciting that no totalitarian temptation can stop it.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, crisis after crisis, war after war, we are witnessing human misery and the suffering of others. As the number of displaced people continues to be fuelled by new conflicts and traffickers continue to profit financially from human misery by sparkling a European Eldorado and organising lucrative channels of emigration, we know that, for the vast majority, the European dream will never come true and that it regularly ends in nightmares. Once in Europe, exiles often find themselves living in deplorable and inhumane conditions, without work, without prospects for the future and totally uprooted. As we face the war in Tigray and the ravages of that war on children, it is clear that yesterday’s crisis management policies must be rewritten to deal with today’s crises. The construction of host cities – the ‘Asilia’, as Pacasse called them – near the affected areas would enable the rapid and effective deployment of relief resources to the population. Health, schooling and adult learning would be a priority. Daily life in an Asilia city, managed through international partnerships, would offer everyone the opportunity to anticipate the future: preparing, for the vast majority, the return to the lands of their ancestors; by applying for asylum elsewhere for others. While the number of children displaced and on the immigration route is cold in the back, the disastrous Immigration and Asylum Pact, which the Commission presented in September 2021, makes immigration to the European Union the heart of its project. But what a mistake! It is clear that the solution to the crises on the African continent is not in Europe, it is in Africa. Intracontinental or intraregional community-based management would prevent unnecessary trauma for families and children and protect them from the dangers of emigration, which often depends on mafia networks. This appalling crisis in Tigray offers the European Union the opportunity to break with its sacralisation of emigration to the distant European Union by putting proximity at the heart of a political project to help the population.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, this is the first time I have spoken in the Chamber of the European Parliament, here in Strasbourg, and I greet all my colleagues. I was born Dutch and chose France. A conscious and voluntary choice, an exclusive and definitive choice. You understand that, in my career, I am intrinsically European, of all logic. If I listened to the speech, I would have to join the European Union, the construction of Europe. However, as you see it, your European organisation presents itself, it seems to me, with unnecessary aggressiveness, a chilling ideology and a lack of knowledge or even contempt for democratic decisions. What pains me is that the beautiful European idea I believe in, you are ruining it by making the European Union an undertaking to destroy nations. For someone like me, who knows the nations of the North as well as the nations of the South, it is the very negation of Europe. Europe is the daughter of Athens and Rome. It is rich in its diversity, its peoples, its cultures, its languages, its traditions, its savoir-vivre. But above all, Europe is the daughter of freedom and the mother of democracy. That is why, Commissioners, ladies and gentlemen, you do not find me at your side, but in a group that defends the only true idea of Europe, that Europe that flows in our veins and that we must pass on to our children.