Speeches

The next meeting will be held tomorrow, Tuesday 16 December at 9 a.m. The agenda has been published and is available on the website of the European Parliament.

Unless I'm mistaken, this was the list for today. Thank you for holding through. We try to do it as equitably as possible. That concludes the item. Thank you, Commissioner. Thank you to all the team. I would like to thank the interpreters and everybody ensuring the functioning of the plenary.

Personally, I wish you a merry Christmas! The institution is secular and the Union per seIt respects all religions and tries to respect them all at the same time.

We move on to the next item on the agenda, the last one, interventions lasting 1 minute. I would like to inform you that for interventions lasting 1 minute, you are invited to speak from your seats.

Commissioner Hoekstra, we would like to thank you for participating in the debate, for your patience and for your concluding words. The debate is now closed.

As a citizen who also lived under Communism, this forum provides the liberty to hold a speech like yours. There is an important distinction. (Interruption by Grzegorz Braun off mic) As the Chair, I conduct the service and I ask you to go to your place please. Now we continue the debate. You insulted the room by calling them stupid; I was just commenting on the freedom of speech we do have here.

Mr President, Commissioner, we are on a ship that is in the middle of a storm, and yet we use buckets to get the water out. Instead, we need to stabilise the ship, to have a steady ship, to know where we're going. I am using this metaphor because this is the yearly budget. We barely managed to move a few funds around to strengthen our priorities. What we truly need is a systemic solution – something that enables us to be strong in the face of dangers, such as defence dangers, like we have in Romania today, with Russian drones all over our skies. Systemic dangers such as the ones for the youth with their housing crisis, with their sinking Erasmus+ scholarships, with the failing health system, with the need to adapt for climate because we've already lost the battle to stop the climate change. So, Commissioner, I am not here to judge. I am just saying that for the future, we need communitarised loans. We need to stand together as a Union to really stop the feeling of chaos and have the feeling of leadership.

The next meeting will be held tomorrow, Thursday 13 November 2025, at 8.30 a.m. The agenda has been published and is available on Parliament’s website. The session is closed.

I would like to thank Madam Vice-President for your patience, our interpreters, our staff, our security, our huissiers and everybody for making this sitting a good one. That concludes the item.

The next item is a short presentation of the report by Evelyn Regner, on behalf of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, on Business in Europe: Framework for Income Taxation (BEFIT) (2023/0321(CNS)) (A10-0194/2025).