Speeches

Madam President, at the age of 78, Donald Trump manages in a few days to cheer up the European Commission, but also the leaders of many states, including France. Whatever one thinks of his ideas, one can only note his dynamism, his voluntarism, which contrasts with the immobility surrounding here. Because Donald Trump and his entourage behave like business leaders, action-reaction, in less than a month, there are dozens of decrees that have already been signed and concretely change the lives of Americans and strengthen the competitiveness of the United States. Every dollar spent is analyzed and spending and agreements harmful to the country are simply stopped without taboo and without delay. And here, what are we doing? We are offended, we debate not to say anything. We take pious vows on human rights that never have any impact. We are adding new standards to our fellow citizens. We do not control how European funds are spent, we do not tackle bad spending, we go into debt, and above all we do not question any dogma. But you're serious? Is that the European Parliament? A Parliament of the loose? By proclaiming "America First!Donald Trump defends American interests and, as an American, he is right. What bothers me is not that he is defending American interests, but that the leaders of the European Union have long been unable to defend European interests. Jordan Bardella reached out to all right-wing groups and proposed to end the Green Deal together, which is undermining our growth, competitiveness and penalising our industries, farmers and the purchasing power of our citizens. The ECR and ESN groups kindly welcomed our outstretched hand and we thank them for that. What is the European People's Party doing? Are you no longer on the side of business and the real economy? Would you rather be on the side of the keffieh-wearing left, socialists and punitive ecology? Wake up! Grab our outstretched hand. Ask us about the end of the Green Deal. Be on the side of the people, on the side of history, let's write history and not be like the cows who, on the edge of the tracks, watch trains pass, whether Chinese or American.

Mr President, in this report you are concerned about demography in Europe. Not out of a spirit of identity or a desire to transmit, but only for low commercial reasons. For you, Europe is not carnal, it is a market. Your only concern, it has been understood, is to have a workforce. Then your solution is, as often, only in the short term: it is the use of immigration, forgetting in passing the horrible consequences of mass immigration for our peoples, from whom you never ask their opinion on this reception. The reasons for the demographic crisis are simple, they are socio-economic. Many young European couples want to start a family, but do not do so because they are already unable to make a living from the fruits of their work. They do not live, they survive and they do not want to take the risk of taking in a child in poor conditions, whether it is economic, social or even physical security, because your record is crisis and mistrust in all areas. Try to hear what I am saying, because here I am relaying the despair and distress of these young Europeans, more and more of whom are giving up having children out of spite. You are responsible for the face you leave of Europe. For you, all births are equal. Personally, I prefer European births in Europe. If the face of Europe is to remain European, there is an urgent need to promote birth policies and restore the confidence of our young people, rather than resorting to immigration that no one wants, except big business, to reduce wages.

Mr President, sometimes in this Parliament you would like us to believe that you are fighting for freedoms. So, like earlier with the Sakharov Prize, you bring people here to the public. You make them applaud – and rightly so – for their actions in favour of freedoms around the world, knowing that you would often be unable to do what they do, because it is fear that guides most European policies today. Then you realise that freedom of expression also allows your opponents to express themselves. And then freedom becomes a crime, and you try to regain control over the people. So, right now in Romania, you would like us to believe that TikTok would have ordered voters to go and vote for a candidate. You even support the cancellation of democratic elections for this reason alone. Amazing! As if the citizens were stupid enough to go and vote for TikTok... Do you realize the absolutely delusional infantilization that you and your friends commit? We, the Patriots for Europe, believe in the exercise of everyone’s critical sense. It is up to citizens to receive the information, sort it and choose it. It is not up to you to moderate TikTok today or the press tomorrow. Otherwise, it is called either censorship, dictatorship or sect. And we don't want to have a guru.

Madam President, during COVID-19, Europe was the laughing stock of the world because it did not have masks and had to import them. Do you remember that? This obviously did not serve as a lesson for you, because, with the EU-Mercosur agreement, it is our sovereignty and our food independence that you will destroy. When you have ransacked French agriculture – one of our wealth, strengths, specificities and national carnal prides – how will you do in the event of a food crisis? Will you do as with the masks? Will you import? You'll sign multi-billion-dollar SMS contracts, too? And what will you import? Animals fed growth hormones, stuffed with antibiotics? Have you forgotten about public health in all this? What lobbies, what interests are you defending here? You pretend to be ecologists everywhere. Is it not the first ecology to produce and consume locally, where possible? So why do you want to impose the opposite on us by importing products that are vectors of unfair competition, which do not meet our health quality standards or our environmental standards? What will become of our landscapes, our peasants? What are they to you? Do you rejoice to see them commit suicide one by one? We have asked for a real debate on Mercosur to be held here this week. The groups of traitors from the right, center and socialists refused. Know that, if Mr. Macron and his allies do not defend the interests of France, we, at the Rassemblement national, are and will always remain on the side of farmers. The people of France have not said their last word.

Madam President, this debate on the right to drinking water in Europe is an important opportunity to tell you, as my colleagues Tolassy and Rougé have done, my disgust and shame. At a time when this Parliament and national parliaments are spending billions for the entire Earth, whether it is the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa – whose slippages and anomalies the European Court of Auditors has pointed out – billions from the Ukraine Facility – which you are throwing up in the air indefinitely without seeking any peaceful solution to this war – or billions for the countries you want to see enter the European Union – and which would, once entered, only be burdens, not being net contributors to the EU budget – our own citizens, at the same time, do not yet have access to drinking water in 2024. I am talking about our fellow citizens in the French overseas territories, who look at us and rightly feel that they are considered as sub-citizens. Yes, access to drinking water should be a right for every European. The government of a major power such as France should make this a priority. It is just a matter of human dignity. Where are human rights here? Doesn't that shock you? On this subject, I would like to refer here to a second scandal. You talk about ecology all day long while paying billions to trash our landscapes – including the wind lobby – while you murder nuclear power and promote the European electricity market – which is ruining our purchasing power – at the same time, according to the French Biodiversity Office, 1 billion cubic metres of water is wasted every year in France. This is only because there is no strategic management of water resources and the State leaves the local authorities managing them powerless, because their only solution to invest would be to increase taxes on water – which they obviously do not do, because their fellow citizens already have lamentable purchasing power. When it comes to the right to drinking water, citizens want a strategy, but above all actions, not sterile debates. When will drinking water reach the French overseas every day?

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I would first like to express my friendship, solidarity and condolences to the Spanish people. I was mayor for ten years of a commune in the south of France in a flood zone and regularly flooded. So I was deeply moved by what I saw in Spain, which was terrible. And I saw an emotion, a natural solidarity for all the Spaniards who found themselves trapped and imprisoned. Real scenes of horror for the Spanish people, aggravated by the authorities who were slow to react. This shows that action against natural disasters must first be preventive. There is a lot of talk about European integration. I believe that natural disasters and flood risk prevention are indeed an area where we must be present and united and where we must anticipate – to govern is to foresee – upstream of infrastructure and not just repair the damage after the fact. In my department of Gard, the floods in 2003 cost 700 million euros, so I know the subject well. Infrastructure spending is therefore essential to avoid these sufferings, deaths and repair costs that come too late and do not solve the fundamental and infrastructural problems for the future. Unfortunately, in France, the authorities are also failing. The government currently plans to return to the security of the Petit-Rhône, works yet planned and financed by the Rhône plan. I warn here that a disaster will soon occur under our mandate if the French State does not respect its word on the security of Petit-Rhône in the Gard and Bouches-du-Rhône. I would like the government to pull itself together and hear from all the local elected representatives of all the political parties that are mobilizing on this subject.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the 2023 annual report of the European Court of Auditors blatantly exposes the serious malfunctioning of the Commission in the management of European funds. The level of error in budgetary expenditure reached an impressive 5,6 %. This error rate, which even amounts to 9.3% in some sectors, shows a complete lack of rigour on the part of the Commission. This waste of resources is simply unacceptable, especially when the Court's recommendations are deliberately ignored. As regards the Recovery and Resilience Facility, the picture is equally overwhelming. The management of the $141.6 billion allocated for this facility lacks traceability, and errors in payments are ubiquitous. The Commission does not take any effective measures to ensure that these funds are used in accordance with the rules, yet it continues to distribute them. This is a real scandal, a shameless waste of European taxpayers’ money. Finally, the Court rightly points to the explosion in the Union’s borrowing debt, which reached EUR 458.5 billion at the end of 2023. How can the Commission justify the accumulation of such liabilities when the current control mechanisms are flawed and the management of funds is ineffective? It is clear that the architecture of EU funding needs to be completely rethought before further jeopardising future multiannual financial frameworks. Is the Commission aware that many Europeans are close to the euro and are looking at all this with disgust and revolt? Mr President of the European Court of Auditors, while thanking you for your work, I ask you: Isn’t it frustrating to see irresponsible people managing public money?

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the recent report by the European Court of Auditors on the Emergency Trust Fund for Stability and Addressing the Root Causes of Irregular Migration and Displaced Persons in Africa, a fund endowed with EUR 5 billion of public money from our fellow citizens, is edifying and overwhelming. If the needs are real and the situation worrying, the examples of waste without any control are unfortunately innumerable and shocking. Yes, the European Commission manages our money with amateurism and lightness. In The Gambia, for example, beneficiaries received twice the same aid for agricultural projects, which are also fictitious projects. In sub-Saharan Africa, blenders have been distributed to schools that do not even have access to electricity. There are dozens of examples in this report, which I invite everyone to read. I have three questions. Does this program exist just to give oneself a good conscience? How can we throw away billions and lose interest at this point in the real and concrete use of these funds? Finally: Are you not ashamed to see taxpayers’ money squandered in this way? How is all this possible, and why aren't people who let it happen fired?

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, we have known for many years what you modestly call religious intolerance towards Eastern Christians, which is an absolute horror and forces humans to live in permanent anguish, exclusion and precariousness. I also welcome the initiative of my colleague Thierry Mariani to set up an intergroup on Eastern Christians here, and I hope that many of us will be part of it. But who would have thought that in Europe, once a model of openness and freedom, religious fanaticism would rise so much too. Unfortunately, today, anti-Semitism and Christianophobia are on the rise in Europe, with many places of worship and believers targeted for what they are. This must not leave us indifferent and you must question the causes of all this and listen to us in this matter, too. It is in particular your policies of massive and uncontrolled immigration that change the face of Europe, that create a clash of cultures and civilizations and that lead to hatred, whether religious, sexist or homophobic, and divisions. By not being proud of our roots and values, by not putting them forward, by not reaffirming them loud and clear, by not educating, by remaining passive and by not making us respect, you are letting our civilization be trampled on, you are letting citizens be put at risk and you are letting fanaticism influence the minds of the younger generations with impunity and controlling entire neighborhoods and even cities. There is an urgent need to act and remove from our soil those who do not respect our laws, customs and cultures.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, as we are debating border controls in the Schengen area today, we can only note the recent hypocrisy of the governments of some countries. Indeed, those who did not have strong enough words against the sovereignists are beginning to discover little by little that it is therefore necessary to protect themselves from massive immigration. We want to ask them why. Isn't mass immigration an opportunity for their country, as they have been telling us so far? Have they finally realized it, or are they just pretending to act because, in their countries, the sovereignists are progressing electorally at unprecedented levels? What a waste of time anyway. How many deaths and injuries on our soil due to lax security and immigration policies? If these European leaders are really sincere, then they must also, for example, support the Italian minister Matteo Salvini, who is currently being prosecuted for simply being a man of honour, protecting his people as everyone should do in his country. So far, the only border that you have managed to enforce is here in this Parliament. This is the border with the Patriots for Europe group. Alas, this is the only band you should listen to, because we have had the solutions for decades. Implement our solutions and look at the interest of the people: It's urgent.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I would first like to express my full solidarity with the families of the victims of the Solingen knife attack and, more generally, with the German people. This umpteenth attack, committed once again by a Syrian who is asked what he was doing on European soil, must ask us about the lax migration and settlement policy supported by the European Commission. Because we are elected, it is up to us to take care of our fellow citizens, to watch over them and especially over the most fragile, those who cannot defend themselves and who some, here, too often forget from their preserved neighborhoods. Obviously, the policies defended so far by the European Union have allowed the occurrence of these tragedies that have become daily occurrences. And behind these cold numbers of dead, wounded, there are human beings, families broken forever. The globalists would have us believe that these migrants whom we welcome against the will of the people will all become engineers or doctors. Do they seriously believe that? Again, here in Solingen, this is obviously wrong. Will the elected representatives of this Parliament finally force the Commission to protect our children and grandchildren from these stabbing Islamist barbarians who hate our civilization, or are they waiting to be personally affected to have a political reaction other than flowers and candles? Our citizens are angry. You owe them security by no longer welcoming anyone without limit and by listening to those who have been preaching in the desert for years and telling the truth.