Speeches

Madam President, yes, of course, and although there has been no question, I will try to give an answer. In the European People's Party we are extremely clear that the industrial policies, the development policies and the industrial future of the European Union, must always be compatible with climate policies and always be coordinated with them, and never be subordinated to them.

Madam President, the crisis in the automotive sector is no longer a threat. It is an absolute reality. Faced with this reality, citizens, especially those millions of workers in the automotive sector who today do not see their future work clearly, demand urgent and forceful actions from all of us. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that we get down to work to promote reforms and reorient our policies and our strategies, including climate, if we do not want to be dragged down by a doped foreign competition. The extraordinarily ambitious climate policy is one of the burdens of the automotive sector. The emission reduction targets we set for the sector today are far from being achieved. The response of the Community institutions can in no way be to punish producers and impose extraordinarily high and unjustified fines on them. The review of the Emissions Regulation needs to be undertaken now – ahead of 2025 – in order to revise the interim targets and also to honestly introduce the role of biofuels and synthetic fuels and thus ensure the principle of technological neutrality. We must also address the future in 2035 and beyond 2035 and the role that plug-in hybrids will play thereafter. If we do not do it now, if we do not act urgently and forcefully, we will pay for it in terms of employment and in terms of the destruction of what is still the European Union's flagship industry today.

Madam President, we agree, of course, to a large extent with the analysis made by Mr Draghi in his report, as well as with the need to adopt measures as soon as possible to curb this process of loss of competitiveness and to address as soon as possible the measures to put it into effect. It is necessary, of course, to take action and change our political priorities by bringing to the forefront those that allow us to recover competitiveness and simultaneously initiate a necessary process of reindustrialization of our economy. I would like to draw attention to one of the flagship sectors of European industry: the automotive sector. A sector that is now under threat, undoubtedly weighed down, among other things, by the loss of the balance between industrial policy and climate policy and by the limited flexibility we have given it to achieve the objectives we have entrusted to it, without even knowing or properly assessing whether these were feasible or not. The achievement of the objectives of competitiveness of the automotive industry expressed in the Draghi report, with which we mostly agree, requires that beforehand all, absolutely all, including all the members of the College of Commissioners, assume the non-subordination of the same to the principles of decarbonization and understand the strategic character that has had, that has and that must have the automotive sector from the point of view of both economic and social.