Speeches

Mr President, Commissioner, I come from a country that does not have raw materials, but does have a brain. This is the best human capital. What applies to Flanders applies to a large extent to the whole of Europe. However, PISA results show us time and time again that the study results of our young people do not improve. On the contrary. We must therefore call on our Member States – not to replace them, but to call on and support them – to fundamentally improve the quality of our education and bring it to excellence. To achieve this, we must strive for excellence, with a focus on knowledge transfer among children and schoolchildren. We need to give teachers and educators the space to do their work: teaching. We need to use modern digital technologies in all training. We need universities to cooperate and exchange, for example with the Erasmus+ programme, across borders. We have to make technical education and art education fertilize each other. We must provide researchers and scientists in the EU with the necessary framework and infrastructure so that they do not leave. We must not allow projects in which we have invested a lot of money to bleed to death as long as there are results, as is now the case with the JET fusion reactor. Good education is the foundation for a strong Europe.

Mr President, Minister, Commissioner, our industry is not doing well: redundancies, company closures and large companies announcing that they are no longer investing in Europe. The energy cost and the multiplicity of rules are the well-known culprits. The legs of prosperity are being sawn away under our chair. I heard a call for action here. Well, here is an appeal to our European Council with a handful of concrete actions: One: reduce the regulatory burden and the reporting obligation associated with it. That doesn't cost anything. On the contrary, it relieves our companies and gives them breathing space to innovate and invest. Adopt the standard of feasibility and affordability in legislation for citizens and businesses. Strengthen our internal market, including in transport, energy and services. Ensure a level playing field within the internal market and stop easing state aid, which is detrimental to small countries. Finally: rediscover the nuclear possibilities. In addition to the existing nuclear park, new developments also offer prospects for sustainability, affordability and security. It's five to twelve.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I am addressing the Commission in particular. Finding an inexhaustible, nature-friendly energy source is, in my opinion, the great challenge for humanity. The JET reactor, the Joint European Torus in Culham, UK, started as a European project, is of great importance for the development of nuclear fusion. This experiment is hopeful. It is true, however, that the United Kingdom became the owner of the JET reactor after Brexit and recently decided to stop it. In this way, a lot of know-how and a lot of investments are at risk of being lost. Moreover, we risk losing essential knowledge needed for the new project we know within Europe as the ITER project in Cadarache. I would like to expressly call on the Commission to enter into urgent consultations with the United Kingdom to ensure that the JET project is not abandoned.