Speeches

Mr President, thank you colleagues for coming to this important debate about constitutional affairs. I’m very happy that you made this a priority in your busy days. But I have to tell you, this is a priority. This is about our right, our right of inquiry. And about – many, many years now – we haven’t been given the right to summon people here. This is a crucial right of a parliament, to be able to ask people to come here, to ask company CEOs, but also ministers and national governments, to come here and to explain themselves. We have cases amongst ourselves where we have team members taking bribes from Russia, where we hire, apparently, Chinese spies. All of these topics, we need to be able to follow up with a commission of inquiry. And this is what this is about. We are being denied a crucial right: the right of inquiry. And so I think next mandate, we need to sue the Council for inactivity, for not providing this right of inquiry, for not working on our electoral law and for not opening the Treaties as they should under our treaty obligations.

Mr President, to the colleague from the AfD, I would also just invite him to maybe get on a plane from Brussels to Warsaw, take the bus across Poland and then take the night train and get to Kyiv, because then he will understand how close this war is to us, and that it is at our doorstep. Then, when you actually listen to the people there, you understand what it means to lose a brother or a father, and when you listen to Putin, really you also understand that, for him, Ukraine is just the beginning. He’s talking about the lost lands of the Baltics and in Poland. So this for him is just the beginning. Therefore, I’m very proud that we have agreed on the Ukraine Facility – EUR 50 billion – which is, I think, a huge sign of support, so that Ukraine can pay its soldiers. I’m also happy that we have an SME quota in there to ensure that the rather centralised post-Soviet war economy can be further decentralised. But it’s also clear this is just the beginning. We need to send all the weapons that we can send, including Taurus rockets. We need to ensure that our own house is cleaned up. We need to take the veto away from Orban and suspend the Hungarian Presidency. And we need to work towards common procurement and a common European Army under the control of this House.

Madam President, Mr President, thank you, President Iohannis, for sharing your perspectives on our common European future. Very often this House is used for national debates, even from prime ministers and presidents, so I am very thankful that you shared your vision for what Europe should look like. So let me ask you quite concretely, when do you think can we have an improved decision-making in the Council? When will we move to qualified majority? When can we actually change the Treaties? I would love to hear an answer on that. And then second, we have a great moment of European democracy coming up with the European elections. But looking at the different countries and also at Romania, I do see inhibiting factors to democracy, such as the amount of signatures you need to collect to be able to run as a party, such as the fact that you have, I think, to be 23 to be able to be a candidate. These are all things that could potentially slow down our democratic participation. So maybe the last question on this: will you advance the European electoral law act that we proposed here in 2020, with the second vote for transnational lists to strengthen our European democracy?

Madam President, dear Commissioner, President Michel, colleagues, yesterday night we concluded the Ukraine facility and I’m very proud to have been part of the negotiating team. EUR 50 billion for Ukraine – what a strong signal of support. Europe will do what it takes to support Ukraine. We will be there until the end. Slava Ukraini! But colleagues, let’s also be honest. This is not a recovery package, it’s budget support. It’s just enough to cover the deficits. We will need more investment into Ukraine from Europe. And President Michel, the capitals almost didn’t make it. The body of the 27 heads of state and government almost failed to agree, almost managed to block funds for Ukraine, almost became a huge security risk for Ukraine, but also for us European citizens. And all of this because of one rogue member. If I had to do a post mortem about the European Union, I would say it failed because of the European Council and its decision-making procedures. So I really ask you, please suspend the Hungarian Presidency of the Council, trigger the Article 7 procedure to take away Orbán’s veto and also prepare the Treaty change vote so we can get away from unanimity.

Mr President, Minister, Commission, let me react to some of the statements that have been made in this House today. So, first of all, the Commission President called this ‘the hour of democracy’ and I fully agree. But I just wonder why we start this hour of democracy with a wrapped Christmas present and billions of euros for Viktor Orbán, an autocrat. Second, I hear from Mr Zanni from the far right, that the far right is just filling a void. I also agree. It’s filling a void that we don’t want to go into – a place where basically you walk away from content, from policy proposals, towards populism, towards undermining judges and elections, towards a nativist propaganda. We are not afraid of your policy proposals. They are mostly thin and boring. What we are concerned about is the autocratic tendencies that we see happening in Hungary at this point, and that we also see in this House, sadly, presented from time to time. So, I ask the Commission to wake up, to pick a side; to take away with us, together, Orbán’s veto; to suspend the Hungarian Presidency; and, of course, to unblock the funds for Ukraine.

Mr President, Commissioner, Council, it has been a year since QatarGate and it was quite a shock, to be honest, also for me personally, that colleagues in our House would actually be that corrupt. And since then we have tried a lot to improve our rules, and I think that was very necessary to win at least some of the trust back that we lost because of QatarGate. But I’m not sure it’s going to be enough. And I also want to bring us to the title of today’s debate, which is about EU institutions. It’s not only about Parliament, and I think an equally big scandal, if not even bigger, is that tomorrow and the day after, we will have a foreign agent sitting in a very opaque body, the 27 heads of state and government actually representing Russia’s interests when we decide about Ukraine’s future. For me, it’s really crucial that we understand that we have a new gate happening, RussiaGate, if you want, when roubles from Russia roll into Budapest for blocking our support for Ukraine. This can’t continue and we have to work on it. So let’s win back trust by reforming all bodies of the European Union.

Madam President, Prime Minister, this has been quite a national debate, so I want to bring it back to the European level. We have the EUCO coming, and I do want to ask you the question that we asked the President of the Commission this morning, what are you going to do to make sure that Orbán is reined in, that we don’t give in to his blackmailing when it comes to our support for Ukraine, for the formal accession talks? Are you going to take away the Council Presidency? Are you going to push forward the Article 7 procedures? Please let us know your plan about that.

Madam President, dear Mr Glucksmann, thanks a lot for this strong intervention in favour of support for Ukraine. I just wanted to ask, what would you do if you were Commission President now and you had the choice to act and rein Orban in? What would you do?

Madam President, dear colleagues, the rule of law is non-negotiable. Our laws and values are not worth the paper they are written on if they are systematically broken. And I want to be very clear with our colleagues from the far right: this is not about political differences. It is not about having different opinions on certain issues. It is about undermining the exact stage where democracy is happening. And this is not sacred. This is dirty. It is dirty to steal public money and to give it to your friends. It is dirty if you shake the hands of a dictator that is currently bombing in Ukraine. It is dirty if you have unfair elections where you manipulate your citizens to vote for you. This is dirty and this is not politics, this is not democracy – it is the undermining of democracy. And therefore, I want to thank the Commissioners for being quite strong and upholding the rule of law by cutting the funds and making sure that this also stays the same until Orbán decides to actually be positive for his own people, for the Hungarian people, who are not the same and unlock these funds by following simply our rule of law. It is not so complicated. And I would also ask our dear countries to review their bilateral relationships also economically, also in Germany, to see whether we have to be even stricter with the Hungarian Government now.

I’m very happy that maybe soon the blaming of Poland can end. I think that’s a very positive development. From my perspective, the question is really of how we can ensure that we are able to act on a European Union level. There might be examples when other Member States have also been blocking and vetoing things that are in the common interest of the European Union. But I think what’s core is that we have to make sure that we are able to act on the European Union level. This is not about disempowering national parliaments; it’s making sure that the things we decide on the European level are decided by a European government that is backed by a European Parliament, and this is where we have to go.

Mr President, this is not a regular debate. This is not a regular proposal that we are making. This is a very foundational proposal that is happening. And I am very proud and happy that I can actually live in this moment where we, as the European Parliament, trying to change the European Union. And we really have to fix the European Union because it is under attack. We might not see the cracks in the wall, but I can definitely hear the hammering and the banging of the far right, really trying to undermine this Union as we speak. And if we look beyond this place where we already hear this and we look outside and we see, for example, in foreign policy, Viktor Orbán shaking hands with Putin, while Putin is at the same time attacking Ukraine and killing Ukrainian citizens, it is becoming very obvious. When we look west and we see the US again in the grip of the far-right populists, we know that we have to really do something. So I appeal to you, colleagues, to live up to this responsibility, to understand the history, the historic moment that we currently live in and vote in favour of changing the European Union, of fixing the European Union so that it is able to act and live for the next 50, 100, 200 years. (The speaker agreed to take a blue-card question)

Mr President! Many here seem to want to throw the decades-old regulatory measures overboard. Innovation and competition are increasingly being thought of from ministerial offices in the EU, and the idea is spreading that the state is indeed able to shape new markets and products. The Commission is working hard to help. Of the 60 State aid applications submitted, 58 were approved. But this cannot be our approach to a successful industrial policy in Europe. Firstly, it is often a national approach. If we look at this, the chip factory in Germany with almost 10 billion euros, a smaller EU country simply cannot afford it. We have to be careful. The single market must stick together. The second is that as the founder of an innovation-driven start-up in politics, I can tell you that it is very difficult to actually predict what the future will look like from ministerial offices. And it is also the case that we simply have to trust more that our entrepreneurs can function, that our internal market can function if we invest in research and development, if we invest in actually bringing together and harmonising the capital markets in Europe, and if we also correctly enforce competition law again. So let's not just think in terms of investment policy from a ministerial office point of view, but let's actually think in terms of regulatory policy again.

Mr President, wasted government spending has a similar effect as tax avoidance or tax evasion. It reduces the positive impact of the EU budget and it erodes the trust that we as a European Union are a guarantor for transparency. So, the work of the Court of Auditors is really very recommendable and important to keep this trust, and it should be the pro-Europeans of this House who point out the issues with the budget. Now to the COVID-19 recovery fund. One thing has to be clear. The fund has already been a huge success because it created stability in a financial market situation which was complex, and we have been basically saying that no country will be left alone facing the COVID-19 crisis. So, that doesn’t mean that there are also some issues. When we look, for example, at the repayment, it’s absolutely clear that we need European own resources, a plastic tax, a minimum corporate tax to be able to finance the debts that we had to incur at this crucial time of our European history. I also want to make it very clear, Commissioner, that it would be very important that you look at your processes to see where there are issues that the Court found, so that when we set up the next permanent fiscal capacity, we do it with these learnings in mind.

Mr President, I am sometimes thankful for the speeches from the far right, because then when I think of the exact opposite, I know what I have to say. This is true for the budget as it is for everything else. A colleague from the far right in this debate said that we should cut funds because we give too much money to Ukraine. The opposite is obviously true, and it makes me absolutely sick to see a Prime Minister of an EU country currently shaking hands with Putin, who is at the same time attacking and killing Ukrainians. Another one said that we need to cut funds because the corona recovery money is flowing at the same time. That reminds me of the beautiful fact that we had Polish elections, and hopefully soon the justice system will be reinstated in Poland, and then EUR 35 billion can actually flow to the Polish citizens in the dual transition – the green and digital transition. Another one said that we should increase cohesion funds. We should not fall into this trap. We need common investment in Europe for the big strategic priorities of the European Union. For that, I will support the rapporteur in his negotiations with the Council so that we get a strong Europe, a strong budget to fight for our future.

Mr President, Commissioner, colleagues, the Ukraine facility is a sign of historic support for Ukraine and I’m proud to be part of the negotiation team. It’s historic because we sent two strong messages. The first one is that our commitment to Ukraine is long and long term. The Ukraine facility is an institutional design for a long-term tool, that is why it’s so important not only how much we spend, but also how we spend the money. And I’m happy that some of our ideas were taken up here, especially when it comes to defining a minimum share for SMEs, because we do need Ukraine to build new businesses, introduce innovations and push forward the green transition instead of just putting helicopter money on state-owned enterprises. And the second important message – and I think that’s also key to underline – is that good institutions matter. We’ve learned from the Marshall Fund that good governance, checks and balances and transparency matter, especially in a country that hopefully sooner rather than later will join the EU. We have therefore strengthened institutions such as the Rada Verkhovna, where we have involved local actors, civil society, and we asked for a list of final beneficiaries to be able to follow the money. Colleagues, I also want to say that reconstruction will need many additional funds. Let’s face it, 50 billion over four years will not be sufficient to support Ukraine until the end of the war and for the reconstruction. But we started by setting this programme up long term, and I am happy that we do that, because in the end – I mean, some colleagues and I, we went to Ukraine recently – what Ukrainians are enduring for democracy is really hard and I think giving some support here is the least we can do.

So I think what I was trying to say and what I said is that every far right party in Europe has grown on the topic of xenophobia and migration and asylum, and that is the truth. I also condemn anyone that uses easy populist solutions of saying, you know, the others are evil and we should keep them out. And it doesn’t matter what kind of party family they’re from. But it’s definitely true that every far right politician sitting here has used this rhetoric and even went so far as to using Nazi terminology in this House. And that is not okay and that’s not acceptable.

Mr President, we do need a deal and we do need a system very fast, because otherwise we will hear this kind of fear mongering from the right that we heard earlier, not even shying away from Nazi terminology. This is something we have to get over. There is no far right party that didn’t rise on the topic of migration and asylum. I think that’s very clear. But it does matter what kind of deal we get, what kind of system we get. And here I just want to say that while I’m happy that maybe we have a crisis position soon, it also matters what’s in that position. And to be honest, what the Member States are currently proposing doesn’t really work. I mean, let’s look at it. Jailing people and children in the camp would have not helped Italy in Lampedusa, nor would it have helped the asylum seekers. Extending the time of jailing wouldn’t have helped. Transferring some cash to Lampedusa from other Member States wouldn’t have helped. So we need to look at the actual system that we want and that actually works. So a system that works would have fast decentralised procedures, a system that works which, understand that we are one union, and that we need to distribute people across the Union to not have borders. A system that works would have understood that integration challenges and opportunities need to be solved within integration and not by reducing the amount of migrants or asylums that we get here. And a system that works would have a functioning search and rescue system, a system that works wouldn’t put anyone in camps, especially not children. We are better than that. And a system that works wouldn’t follow negative rhetoric, but understand that 75 % of people actually getting asylum decisions at the moment in Germany are positive. So let’s work for a system that works rather than just closing any deal. (The speaker agreed to take a blue-card question)

Madam President, Commissioner, Minister, colleagues, we have said that there are many challenges that the European Union is facing – amongst them, a crazy dictator putting tanks into Ukraine and neighbouring countries that hopefully soon will be a candidate, and obviously the global competitiveness challenge due to the overdependence of supply and demand on China and the need to create, massively, green jobs and phase out brown ones. But all these challenges need cash, need funding to be addressed, and if we look at what has been proposed by the Commission with the placet of the Council, it is not enough. I mean, 50 billion for Ukraine is a good start, but it will not be sufficient to even cover the pensions and wages if the US doesn’t live up to its part of the deal. This will not be enough to trigger reconstruction. When it comes to a common investment strategy, I’m sorry, but we know that Germany alone spent around 10 billion for one single factory in Magdeburg, so it cannot be enough to just have, you know, 6 billion out there to strategically invest. This will not be good for the single market. Let’s get real. We need to address the challenges of our time. For that, we need a budget that is actually worth it.

Mr President, colleagues, I want to thank the rapporteurs for a strong draft and I want to agree with Mr Karas, the thing that the populists fear the most is a functioning parliamentary democracy. And what is a parliamentary democracy? It’s not so complicated. If we were just 100 people in a room, we could potentially still decide together. But since we are many more millions of people, we delegate our power to a couple of people to take decisions. To be able to take decisions, meaning I can bring in new ideas. That’s the right of initiative. I can decide on the government that is actually governing these decisions that proposes new ideas. And I can decide about how the money is allocated, the cash, and that’s budget authority. You bring these three points in your report, and I think they’re very, very crucial. In addition, I really like that you also look into what happens in between elections and there are good ideas of citizen participation that we can learn from. And it should also be clear that if I move to another EU country, I have the right to also participate in the democracy that is there – national elections, regional elections, and of course, the European elections.

Mr President, dear colleagues, Volt – the political movement that I represent – is technically a start-up, maybe by now a scale-up. And we are very much aware what it means to deal with compliance requirements, trying to find affordable lawyers and fight artificial market barriers. Colleagues, we all talk and we love to talk about the backbone that SMEs are for our economy. But we really need to look into the details of the laws to understand what we can do to help them. We need to make sure that they do not need lawyers and legalists to be able to understand what the law looks like. I can give you some positive examples where we have managed to do this. For example, in the Data Act, we ensure that some compliance criteria don’t need to be fulfilled if you’re a small company. And also in the Ukraine facility, we are trying to currently channel a lot of the money also to the SMEs to ensure that we help them. Why? Because SMEs are not only the backbone of our economy, they are also the backbone of our society and they are the ones asking for democracy and for free societies. So we should really help them strive.

Mr President, so we rubber-stamp this proposal by the Council with the 15 extra seats, the deletion of the transnational lists and the invalid budget effect. Okay, we can do that. But I think we have to see that we have learned two things: first, that the Council can be extremely fast if it wants something; and second, that we in Parliament can be extremely weak even if we have negotiating power. Why? What I mean is: what if the Council also acted quickly on the electoral law? We have been waiting for one year to even hear from you on this regard. The transnational lists should be decided there and I am happy that we will have a chance to do that. But this also applies to treaty change. From my perspective, this Parliament already triggered Article 48 more than a year ago as a follow-up to the Conference on the Future of Europe. And what about us? We can say that a consent procedure is not a strong procedure, but the MFF is also a consent procedure, on the seven-year budget, and there we have a full negotiation team actually fighting. The approval of the Commission President is also a consent procedure. So let’s learn how to be stronger and how to really defend our citizens’ interests rather than to bend to national party leaders.

Madam President, colleagues, it’s really high time that we come forward with this report. It has been months since Qatargate happened and we haven’t done much. So I’m very happy that now with the majority of the groups, we actually come – thank you, Gabi – forward with this report. I just want to say it very clearly – transparency does not conflict with the freedom of the mandate. We have nothing to hide and we have a lot of trust to win back. So it’s good that we show what kind of side income we earn, what kind of meetings we have, because we have nothing to hide, and how we spend our money, because we have nothing to hide. Transparency is not in conflict with the freedom of the mandate. I am proud that I could contribute to a more transparent House, and I wish that we all vote in favour of the most important report that we will vote now. Let’s live up to the trust that we need in this House because why should people follow laws if they don’t trust the process that actually makes them? Let’s live up to it. Let’s vote in favour of this report.

–Mr Benifei, I just have a very short question, which is in regards to the freedom of the mandate. People who criticise the new rules often say it would somehow infringe on the freedom of the mandate. Can you understand that argument?

Mr President, it is true that, when we started using ChatGPT, I think we all realised it is a bit like this book On Bullshit, by Harry Frankfurt, the great philosopher, who showed us that, you know, the bullshitter doesn’t really know what the difference between truth and lie is, and he’s much more dangerous actually, than the liar because of that. But to be honest, the more I used it, the more I understood its potential. It helped me actually write a code to, you know, write my own chatbot in Python, commit it to GitHub and then like upload it to Heroku to somehow make it work. I couldn’t do this without the help of, basically, ChatGPT writing that code for me. So what do we learn from this? I think we need a couple of principles out there to help us really work with it. The first one is that we should make sure that large models are safe to use and not biased. We should educate our kids, but also our politicians to be able to understand what this technology is. We need authenticity labels to understand what kind of content is AI created. We need to make sure that those who own the data benefit from it or have the right to safeguard it. We need to tax locally to stop concentration of wealth. We need to make sure that public data is used for public good. We need to make sure that we have a start—up friendly ecosystem to be able to have good AI models here, and we need smart enforcement in global coordination.

Madam President, I just want to remind us of what happened exactly six months ago. Six months ago, in a small household in Portugal or in Bulgaria, every child on their phone, on Instagram and so on heard about the European Parliament. That’s really cool. We bridged the communication gap really to everyone! Sadly, what they heard is that we have bags of cash in our pockets, and we have not been able to win back that trust that we lost back then. We have not been able. This report is going in the right direction, but it’s not going to do that either. So, the key question for us has to be: what can we do to win back trust? Especially since in one year we have elections again and, if we don’t win back that trust, people don’t go to vote or they vote for the radical people who say, ‘Oh, they’re all evil anyway. They’re all corrupt.’ For me, the key question is: what can we do? We can show who we meet publicly, because we don’t have anything to hide. We can show how we spend our public funds that are given to us, because we don’t have anything to hide. Let’s be transparent about the way how we work, and then we can maybe win back some of the trust.