Speeches

Mr President, colleagues, I condemn the US-bashing coming from some parts of this House on this floor. The United States has no better friend in the world than the European Union. We have built a relationship based on history, on values and on interests, but now it’s time for the big game. We can no longer think regionally. NATO is the foundation for our collective defence, but America also needs a strong Europe that has strong military interoperability and mobility. A tank cannot take a month to travel from Constanța to Riga, and then we call that mobility. That is a lame duck for me, and that is not what America needs or what Europe needs. I support what Radosław Sikorski said, namely that we make a useful ally when we are a strong ally. Only together can we respond to Russia’s threats in our region, in Ukraine, in Georgia and in Moldova. In the event of a massive global outage like the one we saw yesterday affecting social media, how do we fight fake news if not together? We might not be America’s nearest partner, but we are for sure their closest.

Mr President, Commissioner, the summer of 2021 taught us all an important lesson: no country in Europe is immune to natural disasters; Whether it is a fire, a flood, we cannot let such events become a normality for us. Passivity will cost us lives. It costs us time, recovery, reconstruction and, most importantly, it costs us the future of our children and I give you an example: My daughter is a year and a half old. For her, 2050 is not an abstraction, nor is 2100 an abstraction, it is as real as this year and this future. This year also in Romania, where I come from, we had, for the first time, several climate events, Romania was hit by a cyclone to the east and west. Desertification continues to expand in the south of the country, and sandstorms are coming closer and closer to Bucharest. There are acres that have been burned by wildfires. In the case of a tragedy similar to the one in Greece, Romania would have had nothing to rely on, because it has no tanker planes and no amphibious planes. We must therefore all be better prepared for such situations, including because solidarity is necessary. So let's choose the camp better: We choose for nature or against nature, we are for our children or against them. Thank you very much.

Mr President, healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have, said Churchill. But how about the European Union? Do we have a European health for all our citizens? Seventy-four per cent of Europeans want the EU to have more competences to deal with crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The crisis needs to be turned into an opportunity to build a strong European Union for Health. You heard Ms Véronique Trillet-Lenoir saying it. In the wake of the pandemic, we saw more clearly the limits of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. The agency was created to mirror the US CDC but lacks its powers and funding. The European CDC has an inconsistent access to data and is critically unmanned. It is named like the US CDC, tries to act like it, but lacks almost everything to do so. We have to make sure that the ECDC is not an empty shell, but a strategic instrument the EU has in dealing with future health crises. Could it happen again, that a pandemic or another health threat brings us to our knees? I think the answer is 100% yes. Would we be forgiven a second time for not being prepared? I think the answer is: impossible. I think here in the EP we have made great progress with the competences allotted to this agency. First, one critical issue is the quality and quantity of the information that the agency can access, so we want to grant specific powers to ensure that the quality of data the ECDC receives is good. Second, it is important that the ECDC has the ability to arrange inspections in the Member States. Inspections are not about poking our noses in. Inspection means first-hand help and means testing in peace what will be essential in war. Thirdly, the new variants prove to be challenging in the race to beat COVID-19 so it’s key for the Centre to provide technical and scientific assistance and to help in the detection and sequencing capacities. My country surely needs it. Time cannot be lost when faced with a public health threat or pandemic. You only get to be the firefighter once.

Mr President, a few months ago Carrie Lam said that foreign powers should not intervene in Hong Kong’s affairs because they are China’s affairs and this jeopardises national security. But what does national security really mean? Let me tell you, for the people of Hong Kong, it is the forced shutdown of the only pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily. It is journalists that are being detained and arrested just for doing their job. It is children being taught under suppressive methods that do not encourage critical thinking. And it’s the 100th anniversary: the CCP is ruthlessly expanding its power, trampling on Hong Kong’s sovereignty. It is no longer enough for us just to be concerned. It is high time we changed into actions and applied the EU Magnitsky Act. Let’s send China a clear message. We stand for the people of Hong Kong and we won’t move aside. That’s not foreign interference, I’m sorry: that’s just doing our job. That’s protecting freedom.

Mr President, Commissioner Kyriakides, Mr Reynders, I want you to imagine that you are an elderly man in a village in Romania or here in France. Just today the press is talking about a man at the ICU, unvaccinated, who said crying: “I didn’t know about the vaccine, nobody told me.” Likewise, the green certificate is a good thing and we hardly got it. Not all countries implemented it on time, not all citizens received it. Many also say here: ‘I didn’t know’. Europe has adopted an act, but that does not mean it can go on holiday. We have to stay here for the people, because we risk going back to where we started, now that the Delta strain is already here. With 50% of Europeans vaccinated, we are at risk, with 25% of Romanians vaccinated, we are one foot in the abyss. Vaccination is our only keystone. Either we do winter sleigh and summer sleigh, or we will be forever unprepared. I want to be with people all the way. The pandemic is not over in Europe, nor is our help allowed to end.