Speeches

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, when we talk about unequal access to education, we spontaneously think of rural areas that are isolated or prone to social difficulties. But this must not make us look away from the essential. Today, some families who can afford it are fleeing public school to private education and trying to keep their children safe, while others are reportedly doomed to study in schools with a deleterious school climate. In 2024, in Paris alone, there were 130 stabbing attacks in schools. This scourge is a tragic reality, which I know well as a teacher, experienced daily by educational staff, students and parents, because of the lack of political courage of our elites who refuse to take the problem head-on. Our responsibility is immense to give back to the school its primary mission: transmit knowledge in a safe environment for all. We owe it to our children.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, where did the Christmas crèches go? Are we now ashamed of our history to the point of having to hide it, relegate it to a corner of our Christmas markets? In France, nurseries are disappearing: in the cities of the eco-bobos. Some are concealed, as if they had become embarrassing, while others are ransacked, as in Amiens. Worse: In Brussels, a nursery with faceless and identityless characters is set up so as not to offend the Islamists, the new voters of the left. If foreign tourists come to France or Europe, it is not to find neutral, erased and rootless cultures. They come to discover a great continent, a unique history, a millennial civilization. Christmas is not a provocation, a crèche is not an attack: this is our tradition. So, yes, to all a Merry Christmas, including to Mrs. von der Leyen.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Brussels claims to make Europe fly higher. Yet our industry is in free fall. By 2050, EU airports will have to source at least 70% of sustainable fuel. As usual, the Commission persists in its dream of becoming a power by the norm, but forgets the main one: industrial strategy. With sustainable fuels three times more expensive than kerosene, only massive production of hydrogen from nuclear power would lower costs. But by a clever mixture of green ideology and concessions made to Germany, by selling our nuclear industry in favour of intermittent energies, the Commission has deprived itself of the means of its ambitions. Finally, with its catastrophic agricultural policy, of which Mercosur is the pinnacle, the Commission is organising the sacking of our French beet sector. A pinch, when it is necessary to produce more bioethanol to decarbonize aviation! But for this, we need a serious and ideologically devoid industrial policy – something rare in Bruxellia.

Mr President, a few days ago, in Lille, two days before his birthday, Mathis lost his life, knocked down by a multi-recurrence driver drugged with nitrous oxide who refused to comply. Not surprisingly, these canisters can be seen everywhere, littering the streets of Brussels, Paris or Berlin. It can even be purchased in stores as easily as a baguette of bread. Yet hilarious gas is indeed a new drug in fashion among young people. Presented in the form of a simple food canister, it is a treacherous substance, with a banal appearance, that pushes minors to consume it without being suspicious. Its consumption is exploding, with devastating effects – loss of consciousness, irreversible neurological damage, violent addiction – which can go as far as the loss of leg use. France will start amending the legislative rules on the sale of nitrous oxide, but we need to understand the scale of the phenomenon in Europe. Let us act to protect young people from this scourge, in honour of Mathis, who should have celebrated his 20th birthday surrounded by his loved ones.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, under the green veneer of ecological virtue, this BBNJ directive is a new illustration of Brussels' technocratic drift. We are being told to transpose an international treaty negotiated sovereignly by the States, but the Commission is taking the opportunity to extend its hold on the high seas and, worse still, on our own national waters. Concretely, this text will require Member States to systematically report research activities, share sensitive data and financial benefits from this work, as well as endless environmental impact assessments open to all NGOs around the world. In other words, an administrative nightmare, which will sink our scientific ambitions, penalize our maritime companies and promote foreign competition. Worse still: it foresees that activities in our own national areas will have to be assessed if they have a significant effect on the high seas. This is a direct attack on our maritime sovereignty, and we cannot accept it. With the Patriots for Europe, we want to defend marine life, not deliver our sovereignty to the cold current of European bureaucracy.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, as the Food and Agriculture Organisation points out, the European Union remains one of the main markets and transit points for global wildlife trafficking. This illegal trade destroys entire ecosystems while fuelling international crime. Signed in 1973, CITES has made previously flourishing businesses illegal. Thousands of species have been saved, but European legal loopholes still allow the legal sale of illegally caught animals, especially when they are not registered with CITES, and online platforms have become preferred vectors of this trade. Until these loopholes are closed, traffic will remain a low-risk activity, but above all a highly profitable one. So yes, we must strengthen controls, sanctions and cooperation between States. But it must be done with discernment, without falling into the ideology of a punitive ecology, where man would by nature be a predator to condemn. It is by supporting local people and empowering our customs and security services that we will be truly effective. Humanity is not the enemy of the living, it is its guardian.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, this week we are going to vote for the latest madness "made in Brussels". With the road safety package, it would seem to be attending the Lépine contest of the worst ideas to annoy motorists. Never lacking in imagination to achieve this, the Commission now wants the end of the life permit and the European forfeiture of the permit. If this text passes, every fifteen years, motorists will have to complete a self-assessment certificate or transmit a medical certificate to be able to keep their driving license. End of thermal vehicles, obligation of the annual technical inspection for vehicles over ten years, ZFE, new carbon tax that will increase from 2027 the price of fuel at the pump, which could take up to 0.23 euros, and so on. All this technocratic madness proves one thing: the Commission has not changed and continues where it excels most, infantilising Europeans and despising the sovereignty of the Member States. Let the states decide, let the people breathe.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, once again we are examining a text which, under the guise of transparency and public health, increasingly centralises power in Brussels to the detriment of nations and the competitiveness of our businesses. With this regulation, we are promised a simpler, clearer and more effective evaluation of chemicals. But let's be honest, this is a new gas plant imagined by our dear little grey Brussels men, these technocrats disconnected from reality, who have never set foot in a factory, a laboratory or an SME. The mechanism gives the European Chemicals Agency, the European Commission, a disproportionate power to collect and interpret data, decided without any real political control. With this text, thousands of SMEs in the chemical, pharmaceutical and materials industries will have to bear these additional costs in a context of accelerated deindustrialization and inflation of energy costs. The failure to take into account economic and social effects in impact studies is a real tragedy for our chemical companies, a real nonsense, while European chemistry, the mother of all industries, is bogged down in the crisis. European chemical production fell by 2.4% in the first quarter of 2025 and has still not returned to its pre-Covid level. While it finds itself literally suffocated, its competitors take the opportunity to get ahead, especially China and the United States. And what response does the European Union have to support this industry? It decides to impose new requirements on companies already overwhelmed by European administrative complexity. This summer, however, the Commission announced with great fanfare a major plan to support European chemistry, including a reduction in the regulatory burden. A real "at the same time" that we know very well in France. In addition, under the guise of transparency, the Commission will require companies to deliver all their studies, at the risk of compromising industrial confidentiality and exposing their know-how to foreign competition. It is therefore a major economic and political fault, one more. Basically, these texts are the perfect illustration of a recurring drift of the European Union. Instead of coordinating national efforts, it adds bureaucratic complexity and public spending. With the Patriots for Europe, we defend another way, that of common sense, of the reality on the ground and of respect for those who produce, at the service of the European peoples.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen of the technocrats, what have motorists done to you so that you will be so hard on them? Even Germany is sounding the alarm and Chancellor Merz has just asked to reconsider the end of the combustion engines in 2035. This is obviously good news, as it is notorious that with Mme von der Leyen, when Berlin speaks, the Commission executes. But at what price? Thousands of jobs that have already disappeared, factories that have closed, whole families that find themselves in precarious situations. Banning and taxing are your favorite words. However, our manufacturers ask for very little: time, flexibility, common sense; This is completely lacking in this Commission. You beat up motorists with absurd standards, obsessed with a green and diminishing ideology, and dream of a world without cars and factories. But it is not a dream, it is a nightmare. Europe must once again become a producing power; It will become so again after M's departure.me von der Leyen, and the sooner the better.

Mr President, 'Beetroot, a new wealth for France': With these visionary words, Napoleon enabled Europe to ensure its full food sovereignty. Full sovereignty that you, unworthy heirs, methodically ransacked. First by the standards: Since 2018, no less than 30 substances have been removed from our growers' toolbox. Then, by your free-trade diktat: our markets are flooded by Ukrainian and Pakistani exports of sugar and alcohol produced without any respect for standards. And here is now the Mercosur, ready to sink the last nail of the coffin of the beet sector. While in France 6 out of 25 sweets have been shut down in the last ten years, you are organizing in the greatest opacity this disastrous treaty that will amputate France from one eighth of its surfaces and threaten all of its ethanol production. It is also a health risk: Brazilian sugar, produced with about forty substances banned at home, will flood our stalls. Faced with this organized shipwreck, it's time to say "Stop!". Defending beet means defending our farmers, our jobs, our health and, above all, our sovereignty.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, it is time for the Commission to stop pumping air from motorists. While the European market is the only one that has not returned to its pre-Covid level, Brussels continues to impose unrealistic standards. Now is the turn of vehicle circularity and recycling, another nightmare for European car manufacturers. By requiring 25% recycled plastic for a new vehicle and, later, the same for steel and aluminum, all the conditions are in place to create unbearable shortages and costs for this industry that you are squandering. And that's not all! The famous circularity passport imposed by the Commission will further increase the administrative burden, with a real bureaucratic coping of each part throughout the life of the vehicle. In the name of a green ideology above ground, you see the wall in front and yet you continue to accelerate. The shock will be all the more violent for our compatriots who, however, only ask to move freely and to safeguard their jobs.

Madam President, did the European Union want to be an ecological model? It is becoming an industrial cemetery... By dint of standards and bans, you have not reduced pollution: you have relocated it, and with it our factories, our patents and our jobs. Ultimately, this ecological impasse worsens our carbon footprint, as we have never imported more products from the most polluting countries. Moreover, without affordable energy, there is no competitiveness. Yet the EU still refuses to recognise nuclear as clean energy and imposes ruinous energy choices, such as the target of 42.5% renewable energy by 2030. We were the first to denounce this schizophrenic policy, and some in Europe are doing everything to silence those who carry a speech contrary to the Brussels doxa. Here I want to reiterate my full support for Marine Le Pen, who is bravely facing a legal coup in France. Nothing can stop a people from starting to hope again, so hold on, we're coming!

Madam President, in which country is a television channel shut down because it does not appeal to good thinking? In which country was the leading candidate in all the polls just made ineligible for the 2027 presidential election following an unprecedented legal coup? This country is France, the land of the Enlightenment, the home of human rights. Today, Marine Le Pen is prevented from running for president in 2027. A most arbitrary sentence, which shocks even our fiercest opponents. As you can see, the judges justify this provisional execution by the ‘supposed’ existence of a risk of recidivism, preventing any possibility of appeal before the election. They are actually trying to muzzle those who would commit the crime of not thinking like them. How can the European Union claim to be giving lessons in democracy to Hungary or Romania when, before its eyes, an unprecedented decision is disrupting the democratic process in France? While the rule of law has never been more mentioned, democracy has never been more flouted. This is an attack on the values we are supposed to defend here.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, wake up! Donald Trump sends a clear signal to Europe, to us to rise to the challenge. For too long, you have sold off our sovereignty, ransacked our agriculture, our auto industry, and fractured our nations in the name of a globalist ideology disconnected from reality. You lecture Donald Trump who chose to defend the interests of the Americans. But when are you going to defend those of the Europeans? Wake up! Under the pretext of the Paris agreements, you imposed deadly restrictions that stifle and kill our industries, under the pretext of saving the planet, while China, the world's biggest polluter, remains a member of the Paris agreements without suffering the consequences. These agreements are only a trap into which Europe has allowed itself to be locked, an economic suicide for the benefit of powers that have no intention of playing the game. Wake up! This is the perfect opportunity to finally emancipate ourselves from the United States and take back our destiny, so that finally Europe no longer rhymes with decline.

Madam President, in France, on the 1ster Last January, the cleaver fell: 11 million motorists are excluded from major cities because of low-emission zones, which are also found elsewhere in Europe. This new social segregation punishes those who do not have the means to invest in an electric vehicle and yet need this means of transport to get around. After moving the working classes further and further away from the city centers, that wasn't enough for you. You now want to prevent them from going there, always with the same remark: “The poor are made to be very poor and the so-called polluters are made to live elsewhere.” To stop the EFAs is to stop this punitive ecology that sacrifices the most vulnerable citizens in the name of unrealistic promises. You are also attacking the car industry with CO fines2 and the end of thermal engines by 2035: above ground decisions that will necessarily have consequences on the price of vehicles. So my question is: When are you going to stop bugging motorists?

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, in the preamble to Euratom, a treaty signed in 1957 that I have here, the Member States praised nuclear power. This treaty, full of common sense, you betrayed! For many years, a green obscurantism, carried in this Chamber, has been working hard to sabotage our nuclear power. These irresponsible people have weakened the energy security of our nations, condemning millions of citizens to pay a heavy price. Exploding bills, increased dependence on foreign energy and a dramatic decline in our energy sovereignty. Even today, a coalition of fanatical ideologues wants to exclude nuclear from any European funding, while the European Commission is pressuring France to impose on us its absurd and unachievable target of 44% renewable energy by 2030. Sixty-eight years ago, Europeans showed great intelligence. Try to do the same for once.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, the European Commission is sorely lacking in vision and ambition: size of apples, shape of bottles, frequency of car turn signals, etc. While she cares about the accessory, she neglects the essential: millions of citizens with serious diseases, such as Alzheimer's, often forgotten about key political priorities. Alzheimer's disease is already the third leading cause of death in Europe and affects more than 14 million people. Much more than a public health problem, it is a human ordeal that forces us to rethink our priorities. Instead of producing mountains of unnecessary standards and regulations, the European Union should encourage ambitious cooperation between Member States and accelerate research on artificial intelligence with the aim of advancing early diagnosis and targeted therapies. Late, always late, as usual, in all areas: there is an urgent need to wake up, and the Commission should spend less time coercing and more time innovating. We do not want a Europe of health that tramples on our sovereignties, we want a useful Europe that strives to offer real hope to millions of families affected by disabilities.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, what is the point of talking about biodiversity if we sign agreements like the one with Mercosur that trample on it? As we loudly proclaim our common will to protect biodiversity at COP 16, some countries are preparing to sign a treaty that will not only sacrifice our farmers on the altar of unfair competition, but also accelerate massive deforestation, especially in the Amazon. To increase their agricultural exports to Europe, the countries concerned, including Brazil, will raze thousands of hectares of forests to turn them into fields, destroying unique ecosystems and accelerating climate change: an aberration when we know how threatened some animal species that live in these fragile environments are. How can we claim to defend the environment while signing an agreement that directly threatens it? Proof of your hypocrisy, if need be, you make absurd decisions, such as banning combustion engines in 2035, supposedly for ecological reasons, while signing an agreement with Mercosur that will increase greenhouse gas emissions. Let's act coherently for our farmers, to protect biodiversity: Let's reject Mercosur!

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, a few days ago, in Châlons-en-Champagne, France, a woman lost an eye and a finger during an attack of unnamed barbarism. This is not an isolated fact because, unfortunately, women are experiencing this growing savagery in many European countries. And there are also many of you here who close your eyes. You turn a blind eye to the growing insecurity in our cities. You close your eyes to all those women who no longer dare to go out alone at night. You close your eyes to all these young women who put on tracksuits over their skirts to avoid being harassed on public transport or on the street. You turn a blind eye to the Islamism that plagues our societies and disregards women’s rights by spreading an ideology of intimidation and submission. You close your eyes to these trampled freedoms, to these broken lives. It is time for the European Union to take an interest in all those women whose lives change overnight because they have met a repeat offender, whose place was normally in prison, or a man who had nothing to do on European soil. This injustice is simply no longer bearable. So act, or remain complicit.

Mr President, hell is always paved with good intentions. Under the guise of ecological transition, the European Commission wants to impose the craziest ideas on us. How not to laugh when you associate terms ecological and social and then invent one of the most discriminatory policies of the 21st century: low-emission zones? You want cities to gradually close to motorists, as if they were responsible for all the ills of the Earth. A real social injustice, these highly excluded areas, as well as the ban on thermal engines in 2035, reveal your impotence. Prohibit, prohibit, prohibit: you only have that word in your mouth. But it is obviously always the same ones who toast: the working and middle classes, who cannot do without their cars. Increase hydrogen research, develop safe and efficient public transport, develop localism and short circuits: This is a truly ambitious policy that would make our cities greener, more social and more prosperous. Basically, I believe that the first environmental policy to be put in place is to throw your ideas in the trash.

Mr President, in Reims, in the Red Cross district, it is more and more often gunfire that rocks the nights of families. Drug trafficking is a nightmare for millions of Europeans. However, the European Union remains passive. Bloody account settlements, arson and mortar attacks on law enforcement: this violence becomes the daily life of citizens taken hostage by traffickers. What is the EU doing to address this threat? Not much, even though increased cooperation between Member States would be justified and useful here for the time being. Lax policies have turned our continent into a playground for traffickers. How can we accept being one of the main markets for cocaine and cannabis in the world, given the disastrous consequences of these substances for the health and safety of our citizens? It is time for this institution to take its responsibilities to protect Europeans and to strengthen the security of our borders – even if the restoration of national borders is another imperative. Zero tolerance is the only response to this scourge.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the situation in the European car industry is unfortunately a perfect example of political incompetence. With numerical targets chosen at random or by drawing lots, you know, and standards cascading without impact analysis, the ban on thermal cars in 2035 will only lead to a vast economic and social rampage. It will be a social trash, because you want to deprive the freedom of movement of people who are sometimes up to the euro and can not buy an electric car. I'll tell you one thing: There will be nothing left to decarbonize if you wipe out our auto industry. With your above ground edicts, you rolled out the red carpet to the Chinese builders. Locked in your ideological certainties, you have ignored the cries of alarm of European industrialists and have jeopardized our industrial flagships. Forbidden is the weapon of the weak. Let's invest in research and help our European manufacturers. Let's live up to the challenge. There is still time to break this deadlock. Remind yourself of your ban on thermal engines.