25
Nov
2025
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Haushaltsverfahren 2026: gemeinsamer Entwurf (Aussprache)
Mr President, dear people of Europe, I would like to congratulate the two rapporteurs for their work on this file. This is more or less everything that I have to say. I would like to take the opportunity to shed light on a fundamental problem with our budgetary procedure. Not so long ago, I visited a partner country of the European Union. It is a state that is an important energy supplier for us, an important trading partner, and has a questionable history of human rights and imprisoning critics, opposition and journalists. We had people from our embassy watching the court proceedings of those people who fought for democracy, of those people imprisoned. Now, unfortunately, because we have in the near vicinity of that country, another country, also a partner of ours, that slides down into this direction – also the suppression of human rights, the imprisonment of journalists, etc. – their court proceedings also have to be watched. We needed to shift our personnel from one embassy to the other because we did not have the budget and we could not change the budget. In this time of political turmoil, we need to be able to change the budget within the year, not just decide it once and then let it go.