Speeches

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, for once I agree with my colleagues. When a petition arrives here, when citizens complain, the Commission does not act on it because, supposedly, these complaints concern individual cases or various facts. This is also the attitude of the European Medicines Agency and your Brussels administration, which counts 12,000 deaths and millions of side effects of vaccines against COVID-19, Pfizer and others, without drawing the consequences and which hide the information from the public at the bottom of a drawer. The Commission's current approach of not giving access to documents and SMS, of ignoring petitions, of ignoring citizens by sending petitions back to countries, results in the blocking of procedures for years in the pre-litigation phase, without transmission to the courts and without access to essential documents. Faced with this opaque bureaucracy of Brussels, the best defense is the attack, as the Emperor Napoleon said. Let us talk about the latest report of the European Court of Auditors on public procurement in Europe. Every year, some €2 trillion is procured. The Court concludes that the duration of administrative proceedings has doubled in ten years. Neither Eurostat nor the Commission monitors public procurement prices. The level of competition has decreased over the last decade. Two key indicators are used by the Court to measure non-competition between public contracts: no invitation to tender and single tenderer. Does that remind you of anything? Me, it reminds me of the contracts for the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines with these prices and secret clauses. Finally, I will quote the Court of Auditors: Since public procurement involves large sums of public money, there is a risk of fraud and corruption. In public procurement, transparency is therefore essential to ensure that decision-makers are all held accountable for their actions. The European Ombudsman asked us last week to fight corruption and she is right. This must be a priority for all of us, and Qatargate must not hide the Pfizergate.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to vote to ban the vacuum on both sides, to bring containers of wine, milk and cattle from New Zealand. Brussels therefore wants to ban vacuum in cartons, ban camembert boxes or fruit crates. So like you, if I were a bureaucrat in Brussels, I would also force children to finish their Lego in shops to avoid these useless boxes. If I were a bureaucrat, I would impose a single size for cabin suitcases. If I were a bureaucrat, I would replace steaks with insects because cows threaten Argentinian glaciers. I would also ban fuel-powered cars and cheap planes. If I were a bureaucrat, I would also ban Twitter and put in place widespread surveillance. I would also ban the words ‘Christmas’, ‘Madam’, ‘Sir’, ‘He’, ‘She’. It is with these methods that bureaucrats find themselves banning our camembert boxes because they saw plastic waste on a beach during their holidays in Bali. Of course we are in favour of recycling packaging and against these useless plastics. We already have a law in France, so let the French live in French, and the Europeans live in Europeans.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, after decades of industrial destruction, it is time to repair Europe. With this proposal, the European Commission wants to ensure that more products are repaired under the legal guarantee. It also wants consumers to have easier and cheaper options to have products repaired when the legal guarantee has expired. Indeed, we have all realized this with planned obsolescence, spare parts that cannot be found or are more expensive than the device. This has also been seen with companies like Apple pushing for overconsumption with the release of new mobile phones every six months. We share the objective of encouraging practices promoting the circular economy, where an informed consumer would first choose to repair a product before replacing it, mainly for reasons of combating overconsumption and waste, and all the pollution that results from it. We can only regret that repair services, which provide local jobs, are too often inaccessible due, for example, to a lack of access to affordable spare parts. The Commission wants to chase waste and this is good by empowering consumers and producers in particular. Either. This idea would be commendable if the same Commission applied its own rules to itself. The best bad example being the over-ordering of vaccines at Big Pharma: 4.6 billion doses for 768 million injections in Europe. How many doses destroyed, how many doses wasted? How much will it cost European taxpayers? Who benefits from this scandal?

Mr President, Commissioners, on 10 October, three days after campaigning in Bordeaux on the campus of Emmanuel Macron’s party, you, Commissioner, vehemently launched a battle of tweets with Elon Musk, owner of X. You accused X – formerly Twitter – of doing too little against the dissemination of illegal content and disinformation. Elon Musk was therefore summoned, by letter shared in a tweet, to provide a reply within 24 hours, a deadline that is not reflected, as such, either in the DSA or in your administration’s practices. Furthermore, what kind of recommendation have you had from the European Digital Services Board to do this and feel empowered to do so? Of course, we all agree that terrorists must be prevented from using digital platforms for propaganda. Your reaction via tweet ultimately falls short of the topic, which is highly sensitive and dangerous. How can you explain that after this social media attack on E. Musk, the next morning you invited your followers to join Bluesky Social, the rival platform of former Twitter owner Jack Dorsey? Finally, for you, you would have to leave Elon Musk’s Twitter and go to Jack Dorsey’s Twitter – the one that closed the account of former President Donald Trump, because of the Digital Services Act – really? But what bothers you about E. Musk? Freedom of thought? Freedom of expression? His revelations about son Biden? His revelations about the control of information during the COVID-19 crisis? No one is fooled here, and this mix of genres is being seen, even on the Berlaymont side. According to a well-placed source in Brussels – I quote – ‘Breton is a politician who wants to stay in the press cycle for as long as possible in the run-up to the elections’. Mr Timmermans, your Dutch colleague, had the courage to resign to campaign. In a letter of 17 October, 29 civil society organisations also reacted to this misreading of the Digital Services Act and reminded you to respect the procedures laid down by law. In fact, what we see here, through your action, is not the fight against disinformation in times of conflict, but the dissemination of your political leaflet. Here, many have spoken of the truth, which is why I will quote Plato: ‘No one is more hated than the one who tells the truth.’

Mr President, Commissioner, President of the Court of Auditors, thank you for your report concerning the financial year 2022. We all see in Brussels and Paris the damage of ‘whatever it costs’. Clearly, the von der Leyen presidency will have been the mandate of the budget slide. I quote: “At the end of 2022, outstanding commitments [...] reached a record €453 billion.” The negative economic result for the financial year 2022 was €92 billion. These are astronomical amounts compared to the European Union’s budgetary expenditure, which is EUR 196 billion – with, in the end, your unfavourable opinion on the legality and regularity of budgetary expenditure. Above all, I note that the European Public Prosecutor's Office has opened only three investigations, whereas you have notified it of six cases of fraud. I also note that we have had no news in the last year of the same Public Prosecutor’s Office’s investigation into the purchase of vaccines by SMS. No search, no hearing, no witnesses. I still want to go back to the contracts for the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines: it is intolerable that we Members and you auditors should always be kept out of these contracts. Why is the Commission so lacking in transparency? What does it have to hide? Yes, you need to check the addenda to these contracts, which commit us until 2027. For how many doses are expired or discarded? How many more doses are we going to buy? How Much Does the Dose of Pfizer BioNTech Cancelled Cost? Is it a €1 billion gift? What is the status of the €80 million donated to the German company CureVac without producing doses? Because, in the end, it is the taxpayers who will pay. As Margaret Thatcher said: “There is no public money; there is only the taxpayer’s money.’

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, this morning in Strasbourg, someone in the street told me: Thank you! Thank you for not letting this scandal of secret and juicy contracts between the Commission and Pfizer, Moderna and the others pass, i.e. €71 billion for 4.6 billion doses for 445 million Europeans. But then this person asked me: Don’t you feel like Don Quixote and fighting against windmills? Is it indeed extravagant to demand full transparency from this von der Leyen Commission? Should we resurrect the 25 Knights of the Round Table to get the truth? May I remind you that Brussels signed another EUR 1 billion deal with Pfizer this summer for eight years to reserve a dose production capacity? May I remind you that it was the press that warned us of certain activities of the President’s husband, across Europe, in the Orgenesis scandal? Should we believe that his brother is the CEO of an online betting company, which is active in the insurance sector in Romania? Why was the report of the European Insurance Authority not communicated to Members on this issue? What is the Commission hiding? Official documents of European agencies must be public. The EMA’s analyses of the side effects of medicinal products must be public. All Brussels documents must be public.

Madam President, on 2 October, the fifth anti-COVID dose was also launched in France. But nobody will tell you about the fact that the Commission has just changed the authorisation of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. I quote: Given the available data on myocarditis, the current warning on this risk needs to be modified to reflect clinical evolution and outcome. More often, after the second vaccination, and more often in younger men, some cases required intensive medical care and fatal outcomes were observed. So we have a Pfizer product that Brussels admits can and has killed. However, battalions of influencers have been downplaying this side effect for two years. Why force our young soldiers to take this risk? I quote the Commission again: the duration of protection afforded by the vaccine is not established and is still under evaluation. Why does the Commission maintain this authorisation for Pfizer-BioNTech?

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, therefore, on behalf of the management of the next emergency, you want to give the Commission more power. We already support this cooperation between European governments in times of crisis and any proposal to speed up decisions in the Council. However, confiding in the Commission’s administration in times of crisis is neither realistic nor effective. During the pandemic, the European Court of Auditors noted some amateurism: no logistics experts or legal experts, and above all a lack of transparency in purchasing contracts. How can we forget the SMS scandal between Von der Leyen and the CEO of Pfizer, who won the biggest contract, with orders until 2027 for billions of euros? As long as this matter is not clarified, we cannot agree to entrust this administration with negotiating purchases for us by paying more, pre-empting the production of our companies without even knowing to whom Brussels will send the products, or intervening in the management of our borders. How do you explain that the EU pays more for Pfizer-BioNtech doses than Brazil or South Africa?

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Madam Rapporteur, how can we talk about consumer credit, not to mention price inflation? What must have been an exception has become, over the years, a way of life, or even a way of survival. A credit to pay your bills, a credit to pay your taxes or simply to go on vacation with your children. Inflation is a tax for the poor, a bonus for the rich, as a former French president said. We must therefore protect consumers at all levels, and especially their health data, which should not be used by credit institutions to exclude or overtax them. This text is a step forward for some European countries, but we are not going far enough on credit insurance. Former patients will still have to wait years, especially after cancer or other diseases, for equal access to insurance. This European Union has created inflation. We wonder for whom, why?

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, yesterday we voted for the Pfizer report and today I am pleasantly surprised. Does the night carry advice? Because yesterday you had the opportunity to sanction, in the context of the Pfizer report, the work of the Commission which was, as we have seen, a reflection of the work of lobbyists. Indeed, that COVID-19 report did not mention either Pfizer or the SMS case, let alone the issues raised by the Court of Auditors on the lack of transparency. And you know the scandal of those juicy contracts, those contracts to which we did not have full access to protect Pfizer’s financial interests. Contracts for the purchase of hundreds of millions of doses for another four years. That is why your report is so important. Yes, we must have access to all these documents. Yes, we need to know which lobbyists are meeting with Commissioners and Members of Parliament. Pfizer has access badges. So these lobbyists meet whoever they want here. I propose that this access data for lobbyists be public. The French and Europeans need to know who is lobbying and also why. Ditto when some commissioners go to these hidden meetings held in Bilderberg. Secondly, the documents of the European Medicines Agency, which analyse the side effects of medicines and vaccines, must be accessible in all languages. Most importantly, this agency has to respond to our requests, for example by providing us with the monthly Pfizer side effects monitoring reports, as it committed to during the COVI hearings. Finally, regarding the secrecy imposed on certain documents, we should rather impose on the European administration full transparency or, at the very least, an expiry date on documents with restricted circulation. Even the CIA opens its archives. So the Commission must stop with this guilty and complicit opacity.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, let us call a cat a cat. This report is the Pfizer report. 4.6 billion doses for €71 billion, including 2.4 billion doses for Pfizer at €19.50 per dose delivered and €10 per dose cancelled. 130 pages and not a word about Pfizer or the text messages exchanged between Ms. von der Leyen and the CEO of Pfizer, while in the transparency register, it is discovered that you have contacted the lobbyists of Pfizer six times. Not a word either about Janine Small, Pfizer’s VRP, who confirmed to us that the vaccine’s efficacy on transmission had not been tested before it was placed on the market. You have also seen the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation twice. Why? Who are we kidding? According to the WHO, the pandemic is over, but the stock market reports that Pfizer has negotiated a new contract: The ability to order 325 million doses per year for eight years. Some time ago, the Spanish rapporteur asked that Pfizer not get everything and this contract was shared with Spain. On the other hand, not a word about citizen petitions. However, we believed in this parliamentary committee for transparency. But what a farce! One-way hearings. No debate. No access to Pfizer’s full contract. In camera meetings with the obligation to sign a discharge to protect Pfizer’s financial interests. The administration even asked to delete tweets. Pfizer also asked us to justify our written questions. Your report is next to the plate. Are you congratulating yourself? Want to flood Europe with vaccines? Africa, when it does not want it? Do you want to set up a European vaccination calendar? Want to educate us about vaccination? Want to put the QRcode back in place? You fight against those who disagree with you. So who does this report reflect? Of what? What job? In fact, with the lobbies, the only winner is Pfizer. So you have forgotten the European taxpayers, but I am sure they will not forget in the next elections. In any case, if necessary, you can always cross the street and have a place at Pfizer.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, this von der Leyen mandate will go down in history as an institutional hurricane. The Brussels administration swallows all the sovereign subjects: nuclear, vaccines and our mental health, the distribution of migrants to arrive near you, the delivery of weapons – with, by the way, the creation of a financial ‘Titanic’ of EUR 800 billion. And, for the digestive, Brussels imagines itself a great chamberlain of European diplomacy, with the porcelain that goes with it. So today you are here to talk about a European strategy for hostage diplomacy. But who in the world can trust you? Apart from Pfizer’s secrets, you have never been able to keep anything – as far as our vital interests are concerned. Industrial Bankruptcy, Digital Bankruptcy, Security Bankruptcy: you are importing asylum instead of leaving the fools at home. Annecy’s horror, Lola’s torture: When is all this going to end? Will you decide tomorrow that we can exchange a terrorist at home for a European at home? History has shown that it was the services of the French State, the DGSE, that went to save our French hostages by force or negotiation. Who here would die on a cold night to save our own?

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the Left, the Greens and Macron's friends have told us: “Why do you want to remove Pfizer’s access badges from Parliament”, when Pfizer’s CEO refused to give us ten minutes to answer our questions about the biggest contract in European history. These MPs supported Pfizer. And since then, it has been the Pfizer festival. On the one hand, Pfizer defends its commercial interests: 2.4 billion doses at €19.50 per dose, business is business. And on the other side of that contract, a Commission kneeling down and saying that Pfizer is losing money. But who are we laughing at? I, like thousands of Europeans, am shocked that Pfizer is asking Covid Members to justify their questions on transparency and to leave their phones outside the room. I am shocked to have to sign a paper to protect Pfizer's financial interests, shocked that Pfizer is preventing us from expressing ourselves. And you're endorsing all of this. This wall of silence to protect Pfizer's war treasure is outrageous. This is your balance sheet. And as a reminder, we are not employees of Pfizer.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, have you seen this report by France Télévisions, where the President of the Commission and Albert Bourla of Pfizer are razing the walls in Davos and Strasbourg? And yet, today, you give the Commission a satisfecit for 2021, the year of all records: €71 billion in Big Pharma contracts. So congratulations to the Commission for ordering ten doses per person. Congratulations on hiding contracts, SMS and prices. Congratulations on buying the doses almost €20 when they cost Pfizer-BioNTech 80 cents. Congratulations on compensating Pfizer for the doses they will not produce. Congratulations on buying doses also until 2026. Congratulations on discharging Pfizer-BioNTech from the compensation for side effects. The Commission’s expertise is like Pfizer’s 95% efficiency: Who can still believe it? Let’s talk about your loan until 2058, at variable rates. How many billions lost to banks? At variable rates, what foreknowledge!

Mr President, after this debate on the purchase of military ammunition, this debate on the budget for new own resources. I note that the Commission’s €750 billion giant post-Covid recovery plan was contracted at variable rates. Who had the great idea of borrowing at a variable rate until 2058? Are they the same ones who are negotiating the canceled anti-Covid dose at 10 euros? Who calculated the slate? That is why you want new taxes for Brussels: royalties, tolls, corporate taxes, garbage taxes, compost, carbon, cryptocurrencies, the internet, and even on gender statistics. Brussels wants more money, but for what? To fatten what "big pharma"? To pay Pfizer 20 times the price of the anti-Covid dose that will then be destroyed, to pay emirs via land in Romania, for teachers and roads in Albania, for crabs in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania? And why not budget for Thionville Emergencies, teachers and roads, or for the Thionville Bridge Club, when it would be more useful, more legitimate in Thionville? Taxes of Europeans for Europeans. For Chateaubriand, after the age of superiority and privilege, your administrative empire is now experiencing the age of vanities. Yes, vanity, for you have the vanity of wanting to command elected governments. Worse, and now here are your orders or blackmails: plan labour law, plan pensions in France, suffer migrants in Italy, choose other judges, choose other journalists in Poland or Hungary, otherwise you will not have EU funds. Blackmail, therefore, and in addition with an air of untouchability. In the meantime, that is why we must not entrust you with our resources, the fruits of our sweat and our dreams.

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, 94% is the percentage of Europeans who consider it important to protect the welfare of farm animals. Furthermore, 90% believe that a European animal welfare label would be useful to inform consumers. Finally, 72% want information on the use of a stunning method for animals when buying meat. Yet animal welfare concerns continue to be flouted on a large scale, either by imported slaughter methods and traditions or by purely economic demands in a permanent race to reduce costs. We are witnessing a real animal dumping. Faced with the ultraliberal drift and the ecological radicalism that many defend here, we propose an alternative approach. We reject insect meal as a feed for livestock and, for that matter, for humans as well. We refuse artificial or synthetic meat. We want local slaughterhouses that allow a return to localism by putting in place trade policies where animal welfare rules that apply within the European Union must apply to all imports. We want a blacklist of third countries that do not meet our standards. We refuse the slaughter without stunning and the import of this type of meat. We also support the idea of a Commissioner dedicated to this cause. Finally, give citizens a central role, introduce a mandatory EU-wide animal welfare labelling system, so that consumers can decide for themselves what they buy and what they eat.

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, this is not a qatargate, but a Bruxellesgate. Four years since Mrs von der Leyen was appointed President and you come to promise us a reform of the Commission's internal rules almost six months before the end of this term? Transparency and accountability. How can I believe you? €71 billion in Covid vaccine contracts, the largest contract in the history of the European Union. Qui cache les clauses, qui cache les SMS entre Ursula et le PDG de Pfizer, qui cache le prix des doses et jusqu'à quand? What are the activities of Mrs. von der Leyen's husband hiding? I have been waiting for your reply in writing since November. Who underestimates the side effects of covid vaccines? Who is pushing for the injection of children? Who censors Twitter? Who refuses to investigate former President Barroso's revolving doors for officials and conferences worth more than €100,000? Why does the director convicted of rape still have his office on the eighth floor? In September, I asked you what sanctions you have in place against commissioners who would not use business phones in negotiations. This morning, your administration tells me that it refuses to give business phones to its agents. So no transparency, no accountability, no sanction.

Madam President, Mrs O'Reilly, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, Madam Ombudsman, first of all, thank you and congratulations for your work. Since you headed this institution, you have fought for transparency and against cases of maladministration in Brussels. You have dared to criticise the Commission's purchases of 1.5 million defective masks and, above all, the negotiation by SMS of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. You also revealed that revolving doors are not controlled within the Commission. In 2019, out of 1,000 requests for officials to move to the private sector, the European executive blocked only six. According to LinkedIn, more than 250 former Commission employees work for Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook or Apple. How many former commissioners have become lobbyists? Thank you for asking us about the opacity of tobacco industry lobbying. We need ethics, trust and honor. Madam, I also congratulate you on having opened an investigation last Monday into the free flights that were allegedly granted by Qatar Airways to a Director-General of the Commission. I regret only one thing, that your recommendations are often ignored by the Brussels Commission.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, next year Paris will ban diesel. Rouen, Lyon, Strasbourg will follow. The purchase price of cars is skyrocketing, but Macron’s allies also want to exclude French people who drive petrol cars. Why this relentlessness, when these same people go to do yoga in Bali by plane or get foamed in Davos by private jet? You want to punish a whole generation of drivers with spurious arguments and batons: radars every 20 metres, technical checks every two days, exclusion stickers, one litre of petrol at EUR 3. French people who get up early need their car to go to work, to pick up their children, to go shopping, to avoid unsafe and crowded public transport. This society of surveillance and obedience is not the Europe I love. We must stop with the politics of fear, guilt and punishment imposed by your 2030 Agenda. The ‘all-electric’ is what we do not want. This is an excuse for colonialists, because the electric car does not pollute here, but in Africa, in the cobalt mines, far from your lofts and second homes. With you, for a part of the population, it is the cold shower and the candle while eating pizzas with domestic crickets.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, some Members sell Europe with bags of tickets, others with overpaid conferences: It is as old as the world. How can we explain that Barroso and Monti, two former members of the European Commission, sell conferences for more than €100,000? The Qatar case is the tree that hides the McKinsey scandal forest from Pfizer, and you know that. So, to wash whiter than white, you are announcing today the creation of an independent ethics body. Who are we kidding? Let the von der Leyen Commission clean up the house and lead by example. Madam, SMS are official documents of the European Union. I am a member of the special committee on the COVID-19 pandemic, and we are not even done getting Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, to talk to us ten minutes remotely. We want him to explain his text messages with Ms von der Leyen and his greyed-out contract of 2.4 billion doses. Together with my colleagues, we learn from the press that Pfizer-BioNTech is renegotiating a delivery of 500 million doses until 2024, with hidden prices and against the advice of Member States that want to stop the fees. In total, the Commission has concluded €71 billion worth of vaccine contracts that do not prevent the transmission or catching of COVID-19. With, as a bonus, a policy of pro-Pfizer thinking, imposed within digital platforms through a code of conduct excluding the divergent opinions of doctors and scientists. And you are talking here about ethics and independence? If you want the independence of this ethics committee, appoint a Member from our political group, for example an RN Member, as its head.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, after the billions in health and armaments, Brussels ventures into the regulation of the 2024 European elections, even into our villages. You are all terrorised by democracy, terrorised by the idea of reliving the Trump wave, terrorised by Brexit, terrorised by freedom of expression. Your sponsors subsidise and control the press, TV channels attack your propaganda 24 hours a day, but the flame of freedom has taken refuge on social media and alternative media. We are obviously in favour of the transparency of political advertising, such as the transparency of SMS messages between Bourla and Ursula, the transparency of Pfizer vaccine purchase agreements, and the transparency of NGO lobbies. Yes, let the Commission clarify whether the Orgenesis laboratory, where Ursula’s husband is medical director, receives EU funds, and why the Commission is still buying half a billion Pfizer doses until 2024 at hidden prices! No one is fooled. It is not the transparency of political party advertisements that is targeted, but your fear of democracy, of the outcome of the ballot box.

Mr President, Commissioner, the shortage of medicines in France has become staggering and I am furious, furious, to learn that six-year-old Elhana died in the emergency room in Montauban. Her father told the press that in 2023, losing a child to an antibiotic is not acceptable. Indeed, this is not acceptable. What are Big Pharma doing that spends their time offshoring, speculating? And now you'd have to dice to get paracetamol? It is true that they found a good vein: SMS negotiation of billions of doses of COVID vaccines. In France, in 2023, there are no more hospitals, no more carers, no more medicines. This is the 30-year record of Maastricht, with the complicity of our governments, which are following McKinsey’s advice. How to explain that for months, pharmacists have struggled to obtain basic drugs such as antibiotics or pediatric paracetamol? For the European Commission, Europe will take care of it as with the purchase of millions of doses of COVID vaccines that no one wants anymore. Furious to see that at the same time thousands of expired COVID vaccines have to be discarded. There's an emergency. No parent can accept this shortage. There will be accountability.

Mr President, today you want to celebrate 30 years of the Single Market? Yes, Maastricht has a balance sheet, you have a balance sheet. Thirty years after Maastricht, what has become of European companies? Thirty years of relocations to Asia or Eastern Europe, thirty years of subsidies from our competitors in Europe, the famous Spanish TGVs, Renault and Airbus headquarters in the Netherlands, thirty years of importing cheap labour, thirty years of destruction of our champions Alstom, Nokia, Ariane and Pechiney. Your recipes are out of date. You are the unfair tax competition of Ireland and the Netherlands. Green Puritanism is you too, with the punishment of taxes, the closure of our nuclear power plant, the rise in energy prices to kill our industry. With you, France will remain a digital dwarf and an industrial "Jurassic Park", a HLM country without factories and with unbalanced people in freedom. Emmanuel Macron will just have to turn a blind eye when he comes out. Thirty years ago, I was 20 years old and I even believed in this Europe. We had medicines, satellite launchers, power plants that worked, heating in schools, cheap petrol. Now you have to wait a year to get your car, and we lived through a period when we were even safer to find oil or mustard in the supermarket. In 1993, France had a trade surplus of around EUR 13 billion. In 2022, its trade deficit is EUR 160 billion. It is high time to react. Our continent cannot be absent from the fight for the digital future, nor suffer from culpable shortages such as the production of medicines or chips. For the past four years, Europe's technological sovereignty has been further eroded. Look at Singapore, look even at US President Joe Biden, who is 80 years old and can no longer walk: He himself understood that the United States had to come first, with the anti-inflation plan.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, while President Macron at the APEC forum asks us which side we are on – China or the USA – and states that we need a single world order, or even when the G20 announces the strengthening of global health governance with the lead role of the WHO, Europe is dying under the Brussels bureaucracy. France, on the other hand, is registering deaths in its emergencies for failure to take care. Today, you should not get sick because there are no more hospital beds. Do you have cancer? It will be necessary to wait until places are freed up or you have a friend well placed in a hospital. Private jet forums will never have these problems. In France, we would have half as many scanners per capita as Greece or Denmark. Our French hospitals lack nurses and scanners. We see the same shortcomings with this 2017 regulation, which established a new framework for in vitro diagnostic medical devices, such as HIV, Covid or pregnancy tests. We are talking about medical devices that hospitals in the European Union can keep, but Macron’s France closed 4,400 hospital beds and suspended 15,000 healthcare workers during the Covid crisis. Instead of improving, patient care has deteriorated in Europe and France. In Poissy, this summer, a woman died after 28 hours spent in the emergency room, on a stretcher. We therefore have hospitals that are no longer able to obtain medical devices, European companies that are drowning in bureaucracy and that have to stop producing products that have always been used. In all areas, the Commission is setting up a system of private companies responsible for certifying products. A market of €140 billion in 2022. But let's go back to our subject with concrete examples. How can it be explained that the German private certifier TÜV Rheinland can still practise when he was involved in the PIP breast prosthesis case? TÜV certified these prostheses before they were marketed, then carried out thirteen inspections in thirteen years without ever noticing anything. Certify everything, but check nothing. 400,000 victims including 30,000 in France. Ten years of waiting and legal struggle. For Covid vaccines, we are not talking about 1,000 deaths in 30 years, but 11,000 in one year, in Europe, according to the latest EMA figures. Other pharmaceutical scandals: Pfizer was sentenced to $2.3 billion in 2009 for submitting false statements to authorities for the anti-inflammatory Bextra; Johnson & Johnson, at $775 million in 2019 for minimizing the risk of life-threatening complications due to its Xarelto anticoagulant. Private jet forums forget this sad reality. The Bali G20 statement posted on the White House website clearly has the answers to your questions.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, the European Union claims that combating violence against women and sexual violence is one of its priorities. But it is with seriousness that we discover cases of sexual assault that go unnoticed within the European institutions or large companies. At a time when the European Union is supporting Iranian women, at a time when the fight against sexual violence is at the heart of our parliamentary debates, it is unacceptable to discover in the press, years later, that a young woman has been raped by her superior in the Commission’s offices. She received no support either from her department or from the institution. The aggressor was not given a prison sentence and continued to receive his salary from the Commission. We therefore ask you to add the following debate: “Combating violence against women – strong and immediate measures to condemn perpetrators and support victims”. Ladies and gentlemen, we would like your support for this initiative, at the same time as we learn with astonishment of the horror suffered by 12-year-old Lola. Whatever our differences, we must fight this laxity together to avoid such situations.