Speeches

Mr President, the Commission is trying to exercise humility and decides to go back on some of its rules. She rediscovers a principle of wisdom: Little things the legislator does not care. The reduction of reporting obligations is good, but is it enough? Certainly not, as these adjustments do not put an end to the administered economy it has created. As a reminder, the CSRD Directive involves 50 000 companies, up to 600 ESG indicators to be provided and a cost of more than EUR 100 000 per year for certain companies. The Commission claims to simplify, but it only temporarily exempts certain companies from excessive regulation, without calling into question the bureaucratic logic behind them. Who can believe that European industry will be saved with forms? The "omnibus" does not change the substance of the problem. This problem is structural overregulation, which is suffocating our economy. Today, compliance costs 3 to 4% of GDP, and a European company spends 2.5 times more on formalities than a US company. The elephant in the room is this block of green regulations, which deprives us of growth. As long as we do not overhaul this bureaucratic machine, these adjustments will remain anecdotal.

But you're not ashamed? Aren't you ashamed? Because in reality the policy pursued by the European Commission in recent years is the policy of degrowth. If it has carried out this policy, it is in particular because the extreme left and the Greens, the ones you represent today, have infused this ideology into all public policies and especially into the politics of the company. Today, it is a total failure – fortunately – and it is time to get out of it.

Mr President, Mr Séjourné, the Commission loves the great ten-year macroeconomic programmes which return with the same regularity as the Soviet plans of another time. In the 2000s, the Lisbon Strategy promised us the knowledge society and the whole tertiary sector. Today, his latest plan, the compass for competitiveness, claims to show us the way forward. But who can still believe that the Commission knows where it is going? For 20 years, she has been systematically wrong. She did not see that we were not entering a post-industrial society, but a hyper-industrial world. It did not understand that globalization did not undermine relations between States, but paved the way for economic and trade wars. She did not anticipate that exposure to global competition would not make us more competitive, but more vulnerable. The language of sovereignty, protection and power, we have never ceased to hold, conscious of the world we were entering. But the Commission has never paid attention to our warnings. Now, instead of assuming its mistakes, the Commission blames the Member States for misapplying its recommendations. It is finally high time to really change course.

Edmundo González was declared the winner by many independent observers and by the opposition’s own polls. The evidence, voting records and testimonies of Venezuelans clearly show that he won the election with considerable margin. The repression that followed the announcement of the fraudulent results was violent and merciless. Thousands of arrests, lives lost and heightened censorship of media and social media have been the weapons of a regime that is afraid and knows that its power is being usurped. We must strongly support the legitimacy of Edmundo González’s victory. The time has come for Venezuela to free itself from the chains of oppression. The time has come to see truth triumph, freedom prevail over tyranny and the Venezuelan people take back their destiny – finally!

Mr President, for too long the Venezuelan people have been suffering under the yoke of a regime that has turned oppression and political violence into a system of governance. Nicolás Maduro clings desperately to power, not with the legitimacy of popular consent, but with the weapon of lies, coercion and fear. Venezuela has immense potential, yet it is in crisis. And it is not an ordinary crisis, but a crisis caused by the corruption of a regime that is willing to sacrifice the future of a nation to preserve its grip on power. Last July’s presidential election was marked by blatant irregularities and massive electoral fraud. The results announced by the National Electoral Council were contested not only by the opposition, but also by a large part of the international community. We must be clear: There has been an obvious manipulation of the electoral process. Edmundo González is a man who served his country with dignity as a diplomat and agreed to wear the opposition standard in the face of the ineligibility imposed on Maria...

Madam President, Europe seems to have finally turned the page on its naivety. It understood that ensuring its strategic independence was a necessity in an increasingly unstable world. Today, the European Union, which still imports more than half of its energy, must diversify its sources of supply to guard against critical dependencies. Yet there is still tension between those advocating for an ambitious and powerful Europe and those advocating a degrowth that would ultimately impoverish our economies and generate new dependencies. In this context, nuclear fusion is an essential strategic lever. It offers decarbonized, sovereign, abundant and affordable energy, capable of supporting our advanced industrial model. The future energy needs of artificial intelligence, industrial automation and the digital society will be immense. No intermittent energy source can guarantee a reliable supply at this scale. The ITER project, a symbol of European excellence, illustrates this ambition. Despite technical challenges and delays, it has enabled decisive technological advances, paving the way for fusion control. Learning from successes and failures is now crucial to optimizing future investments. Europe has historically built itself around Euratom, it cannot ignore that fusion is a pillar of its energy sovereignty and strategic power. Otherwise, the industrial history of the 21st century will be written without it.

Mr President, today, the ideal number of children desired by women far exceeds the actual fertility rate in many countries. In France, for example, women want an average of 2.27 children, but the fertility rate is only 1.7. This gap reflects a collective failure to support families in their aspirations. Economic barriers, the cost of living and the lack of adequate infrastructure are holding back these projects. Around 18% of French parents say they have given up on having the number of children they wanted, and 28% cite the financial cost as a reason. Concrete examples show that natalist policies can reverse this trend. This requires ambitious measures, direct financial support, tax exemptions and support for young couples. Europe must be inspired by these models: financial support for families, accessible housing, adapted childcare services and enhancement of parents in our society. Birth rate is not a secondary issue. It is a matter of civilisation, demographic balance and prosperity for our continent. Protecting women’s rights also means empowering them to freely choose to start a family.

Mr President, ‘Thank God, there is smoke leaking from the high chimneys of most factories! For I have not travelled so long without learning, from more than one painful example, that the absence of smoke coming out of its chimneys is a sign of the extinction of more than one family home, and of a lack of bread for more than one honest family," William Cooke Taylor wrote in Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire. Decreasing ideology has guided the Green Deal, and now its first defenders are waking up and talking about competitiveness. Wanting to decarbonise industry while condemning nuclear power is an unnamed absurdity! Yet this is precisely what this Green Deal calls for. The last-minute, secret change after the hearings of Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen's roadmap to increase the share of renewable energy in the European energy mix once again betrays the real objective of the European Commission. What we are experiencing is a real economic war, and we will not be able to win this war by putting such a ball in our ankle. We were right to denounce from the beginning this disastrous pact, which will kill our agriculture and industry, making Europe a continent dependent on all the other countries in the world.

Madam President, educators who have sex with minors, school failures, runaways, physical assaults between children in care, drugs, the explosion of prostitution: the record of child welfare in France is catastrophic. The well-being and success of children in care should be one of the priorities of the State, but this is not the case. These children are the forgotten ones. However, budgets for child welfare are constantly increasing. One of the reasons: social assistance for children is diverted from its original purpose to take care of the so-called isolated illegal minors who pile up with no future in French cities. Overprotected by international texts and by decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union, some lie about their age, others multiply incivilities and acts of delinquency, while weighing on the child welfare budgets of the French departments. To protect our social system, let us finally re-establish controls at our borders.

Madam President, the closure of the last bakery in a village, thousands of families who give up heating because the bill is too heavy, the massive dismissal of 1,200 employees of Michelin factories, a new episode in the industrial bleed that is hitting France. These tragedies, which are the reality of my country in 2024, have a common cause: the rules of the European electricity market. Since 2022, this mechanism has skyrocketed energy prices, with unsustainable increases of more than 50%. By these absurd rules, the European Commission deprives European nations of cheap energy, a fundamental condition for becoming a continent of producers and essential raw material of all the revolutions of the 21st century, whether they are called cryptocurrency mining, quantum computing or artificial intelligence. With these absurd rules, the Commission is causing distress to millions of families and turning Europe into an industrial wasteland. Concretely, it is you who artificially create energy poverty. By these absurd rules, which are akin to institutional theft, the European Commission is confiscating from France its historical advantage of nuclear power, with the passivity or, worse, the complicity of French leaders. While everyone agrees that these rules are unsuitable, including the very Europeanist Mario Draghi, they invariably continue to apply. They continue to strike businesses, to weaken families, to impoverish the continent. The European Commission is unable to reform itself, because it is unable to acknowledge its mistakes, even if it sacrifices the future of the nations of the continent. I am convinced of this: It is the political changes in France that will break the deadlock. Believe me, they will arrive much faster than you think.

Mr President, on 9 November, in Bordeaux, France, an 18-year-old woman was stabbed in the back while jogging. The perpetrator is a 23-year-old homeless Cameroonian, already known to the criminal record processing for choking a young woman in 2023. Shortly after the assault, another woman showed up at the police station and accused the same individual of forcing sexual touching on her. Go running, take public transport early in the morning to go to work, go out in the evening with friends: All these acts that were innocuous, all these everyday acts can no longer be practiced freely by French women, who are afraid of experiencing exactly the same thing as these young women. And all because here, irresponsible politicians choose to open wide the doors of our country. Foreigners are over-represented in sexual assaults committed in France. How much longer will we leave the French in the hands of these predators? It is time to wake up and stop importing into our soil men who do not have the same conception of women's rights and freedoms as we do.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, as we debate, companies with unique know-how are disappearing and leaving entire territories empty of meaning. French companies have always been at the forefront of innovation. Even the most traditional of them are constantly seeking to renew themselves. But they are subject to headwinds: a globalisation without rules, on the one hand, and the zeal of European regulations superimposed on national regulations, on the other. So, of course, doing and undoing is always doing something. But the European institutions and the French state should not forget that when the know-how of employees is lost, it is the entire industry that dies. Today, manufacturing represents less than 10% of French GDP. It is a collective suicide for which politicians are primarily responsible, since it is they who set the course followed by officials who decide on these standards. Behind their bureaucracy there is always an ideology, and therefore politics. The so-called "simplification shock", companies have been waiting for it for years. All business leaders know this: Bureaucracy kills productivity. To put an end to the industrial agony we are suffering, we must trust the captains of industries and their teams.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, we are therefore gathered here in the European Parliament to debate the crisis and the future of the automotive sector - the same Parliament which, under the orders of the Commission, condemned the automotive industry in the name of environmental ideology, and which today claims to defend what it condemned yesterday. We're here in the middle of schizophrenia. While vehicle sales have stagnated across Europe since the COVID-19 pandemic and sales of electric vehicles, which are supposed to boost the growth of the sector, are collapsing, the Commission maintains the dogma of the disappearance of thermal engines by 2035, despite numerous and serious oppositions. Worse still, in order to continue its demands to decarbonise the European economy, the Commission is maintaining financial sanctions against car manufacturers, who face a fine of €15 billion. Who are we laughing at, ladies and gentlemen? What is the meaning of today's debate? Cynicism or powder in the eyes? In any case, this amateurism is extremely serious. It is time to return, in this matter, to reason and reality.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, in publishing its annual report on the State of the Energy Union, the European Commission has engaged in a traditional exercise of style, mixing ideology and self-satisfaction as usual. According to its authors, all is well in the best of energy worlds, and Europe has not only been able to cope with the energy crisis born of the war in Ukraine, but has also overcome this crisis in order to begin its necessary energy transition. The report highlights the following issues: the reduction of the Union's dependence on Russian gas, the reduction of gas demand, gas stocks filled to 90%, the steadily increasing share of renewable energy in the energy mix and, since all is well in the best of worlds, an energy price that would be stable and well below its peak reached during the 2022 crisis. This idyllic panorama presented to us by the European Commission is a veritable Potemkin village aimed at diverting the attention of the European peoples from the reality of its policy which boils down to a devastating triptych: ideology, dependence and recession. Ideology first, when the report welcomes the growing share of renewable energies in the European energy mix, where in reality green totalitarianism and the injunctions of the European Commission condemn sectors of excellence such as nuclear power. Dependence then, because it is fallacious to claim that Europe has gained its energy sovereignty by cutting itself off from Russian gas. On the contrary, Europe is more dependent than ever – no longer on Russian gas, of course, but on US shale gas, the production of which has exploded in order to meet European demand despite its exorbitant financial and environmental costs. The European Union also uses gas imported from Qatar or Kazakhstan, exemplary democracies, it is well known, but also Russian gas that it no longer buys directly from Russia, but indirectly from third countries that resell this gas with a high added value. By wanting to punish Moscow, the European Union has delivered our economy to the American omnipotence without making Russian power suffer. Recession finally, because far from the economic recovery touted at the launch of the European Green Deal, clouds are piling up above the EU economy. Overwhelmed by risky ideological choices that favour the greening of the economy over international competitiveness, Europe no longer has the means to compete with other world powers. As renewables become increasingly expensive and key sectors sink into a lasting crisis, the entire European economy is at risk of recession. The tensions that will arise from this economic crisis will bring down the lie of the so-called European energy autonomy and will, we hope, make it possible to reconnect with the pragmatism defended by our group of Patriots.

Mr President, despite the European Commission's commitments, all of whose voices assured us that the Green Deal would enable the revival of European industry, the prospects are increasingly bleak. We warned that the European Green Deal risked digging the grave of our industrial power even further, and we were right. Reality always catches up with ideologues. The automotive sector is plunged into a crisis that could well make it disappear. By imposing increasingly stringent standards and an untenable timetable on car manufacturers, with a view to banning combustion engines by 2035, the European Commission bears immense responsibility for this bankruptcy. But this situation and this naivety, some benefit, China in the lead, which already controls 80% of the world production of batteries, but also all the critical metals necessary for their production. This deliberate scuttling of one of the European industrial flagships, whose technological advance in the field of the combustion engine has never been filled by China, is further proof of the harmfulness of the policies carried out by the green ideologues, here in Strasbourg and Brussels.