Speeches

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I am very ashamed that the pain is used in a partisan way, that the deaths of more than 200 Valencian citizens are used, the pain of more than 200 000 people who have lost all hope, who have also lost their flats, who have lost their property and who are also in an extremely difficult situation. And I say this because it cannot be used in a partisan way to get rid of the blame and not be responsible for providing solutions. It makes no sense to try to blame others while the responsibilities are not assumed, when the Valencian people know who is to blame. We know perfectly well that more than 200 deaths were preventable, that the population should have been warned, that there was the technical knowledge to do so and it was not done. The Popular Party is not going to be able to get rid of that guilt. Gentlemen of the Popular Party, do not play partisanship, assume responsibility and, really, remove Mr. Mazón from the Valencian Government: is the culprit of this situation, of the human victims; They can't consent to it. Comrades of the Socialist Party, it is easy to also assume that the Valencians have felt that aid has not arrived in time, that although the powers are clear and the guilt is of the Popular Party, we also have the need for aid to arrive from the first moment and remove a negligent ruler who was not protecting his population. It has to be assumed. And to your honor of the VOX party, how do you have the face of coming here from salvapatrias, when you were the ones who eliminated the Valencian Emergency Unit for denialism? Denialism kills. Kill our people! That is why I want to say here that the European institutions cannot fail us. They can't fail us! We have been abandoned by all institutions. That is why I make a clear appeal here: Do not abandon the Valencian people. We will continue to stand because we are a working, united and fighting people, but we need your immediate help.

Mr President, while in this Parliament, a few years ago, and in the Council, just this month, a regulation was approved, the new ambient air quality directive, much more restrictive according to scientific criteria, in the city of Elx, in our third Valencian city, the Government gives free rein to pollution and what it does is destroy bike lanes, pervert the low-emission zone by promoting the use of the car and, in addition, endanger twelve million euros of European funds that it will not execute for the purpose for which they were allocated. Therefore, from here we want to launch this complaint, in relation to all the citizen complaints that are fighting against this situation in Elx, in the third Valencian city, and we ask the European Commission to take action on the matter. We would like to ask you whether you will continue to allow European funds to be allocated against the health of Ilicitans.

Mr. President, what is the cause of the most common mental health problems? What causes anxiety? What causes depression? What causes us to have more and more suicidal tendencies? There are statistics that lead us to the path of how to fix it. 46% of people who live for rent are afraid that, in the next three months, they will run out of houses. More than 40% of salaried people do not arrive well at the end of the month and are afraid of not being able to pay for their food or not being able to pay for their children's books. Suicidal tendencies among the youngest have increased and, at the same time, their precariousness has also increased. Therefore, we already see where most of these situations that deteriorate mental health are going. And how have they dealt with each other so far? Well, look, in the last ten years, the use of antidepressants has increased by 47% in Europe. We're not going to fix depression and we're not going to fix anxiety with pills. We are not going to solve them with pills alone. We are not going to solve juvenile precariousness with pills. Legislation is needed; the lives of all citizens must be improved. And surely we will not solve it with an ultra commissioner who persecutes LGBTI people.

Well, in the right of access to housing and the European Pillar of Social Rights, which we have to guarantee and which will be reformed precisely in this legislature. Simple as that. In the end, it is also a question of responding to what you said in the campaign to your constituents: He was going to defend citizens against speculators and corrupt people. Do you know who the speculators and the corrupt are? Those who speculate with our lives without leaving us access to housing and those who corrupt other politicians to generate more and more social and economic advantages to precisely the big construction companies and the big banks that are speculating with our lives. That's what we're here for, Mr. Alvise. That's what we're here for, to ensure housing for all people.

Mr. President, while we are here listening to the representatives of the housing commercials, more than a hundred, two hundred, three hundred people are being thrown into the streets who cannot afford their homes even if they are workers, who although they work every day do not make it to the end of the month and cannot afford their homes. While this happens, in Europe we have eleven million empty houses and some are determined to liberalize more land, and not to rehabilitate empty houses, put a stop to speculators and put an end to those banks that are making our lives a pure speculation instead of guaranteeing the right to housing. And it is not good for us to be told here that there are no competences, that we have no competences. How is there not going to be competences to advance what it is to guarantee the right to housing, which is an essential right? If there's no housing, do we all have to get out of here now? If there are no rights to guarantee them, if there are no competences, what are we doing here? We must all work together to ensure that housing is truly guaranteed for all people living in Europe. And for this we must mobilize investment plans in rehabilitation, we must mobilize plans for the purchase of homes to be affordable and public, and we must intervene in the market to lower rents already.

Madam President, the European directive on renewable energy sources calls on the Member States to ensure that it is implemented without significant impact on the environment, prioritising rooftops and already degraded areas and excluding specifically protected areas such as Natura 2000. Nothing to do with reality. Spain – the Spanish Government – is systematically infringing this European directive at the service of large companies. In fact, in the Maestrazgo, in Els Ports, a Danish investment fund plans to install more than 60 wind turbines in Natura 2000 areas and SPA areas. We are talking about electric megatowers installed in buildings, in areas and in farmhouses where people have lived for centuries. It is a megaproject that is flagrantly violating this Directive and has administrative irregularities that have already denounced platforms such as No to the MAT or Landscapes of Teruel. Ladies and gentlemen, Els Ports and El Maestrazgo are our homes, it is our life, it is our territory. How long will Europe continue to look the other way while destroying the rural world in favour of big business? How long and by when are we going to achieve a fair and truly sustainable energy transition?

Mr. President, President Metsola will hear these words: school, play, tramuntana, gregal... also orxata. These words are exactly the same in your language, Maltese, as in mine, Valencian, but, incredibly, in this Parliament I can only pronounce them if I say them in Maltese: That's how amazing the thing is. Maltese is spoken by half a million people; my language, our language, by more than ten million, as many as Swedish or Czech, but the problem is not how many people speak a language or how many languages people speak, no, the problem is that languages lose speakers, that all the languages that we have official in Europe do not have the same official status here in this Parliament. Precisely for that reason, because there are other languages that in our States are official and not here, we insisted on President Metsola to carry the official status of the Valencian, of the Galician and from Basque to the Bureau of Parliament. That's why now, from here, I call on her and ask her: When is he going to make that promise effective, when is he going to end this nonsense?