Debate contributions by Mathilde ANDROUËT

Madam President, deepfakes and online sexual exploitation are not mere abuses; These are crimes. A fake video can ruin a reputation, destroy families or push harassed teenage girls to suicide. As for sexual exploitation, it is the new drug of the cities and it pays better, while being a less risky trade. Platforms can no longer hide behind the excuse of neutrality when they monetize attention. They have the means to act: detection of synthetic content, visible marking, enhanced verification of risk accounts, accelerated processing of alerts, rapid removal of manifestly illegal content, traceability of alerts. On the other side of the fence, politics, police and justice must respond with truly dissuasive penalties and sanctions. There are nearly 20,000 underage prostitutes in France. The vast majority are exposed to customers via websites and social networks. When pedophile clients are caught on these networks, which everyone knows, but which are never closed, they receive ridiculous penalties, and it is the child, often from homes, therefore under the logical protection of institutions, who is rebuffed and moved to another home, where exploitation continues. We don't need mass surveillance or censorship. We need a firm and proportionate application of the existing rules, with a simple objective: protect victims, especially minors, without muzzling freedom of expression. Technology must not become a weapon against Europeans, but a bulwark for the most vulnerable.

Mr President, unsurprisingly, COP 30 in Belém was yet another disappointment, yet another demonstration that this kind of high mass is not the right tool to solve global climate problems. Too expensive, too polluting, too entangled in ideology, it must now be noted that the problems generated by globalization can never be solved by more globalization. Saving the environment means saving what surrounds us and not buying carbon credits on the other side of the world, scaring away our capital, confining developing countries to remaining forest rangers while the other part of the world pollutes, which is nothing more or less than green neocolonialism. It will not save anyone, or even the climate, and it will increase the resentments of countries too long accustomed to soliciting the cash drawer of Western guilt. Each country must be sovereign and dictate its own course of action with pragmatism, respect for other nations and a sense of reality. It is all the more grotesque that the European Union is going to play the role of the lesson giver because our model is shaky, stifled by exorbitant energy prices. Are we the only ones who have lowered our carbon emissions? That's the good deal! Our farms and factories are closing, and we have actually relocated our pollution to the world's factory, Asia. And you persist in setting delusional climate goals? COP30 did not logically lead to anything, or so little. The mountain gave birth to a mouse, a mouse in the Brazilian burrow that cost the trifling $900 million. We must put an end to all this hypocrisy of good feeling. The only tangible reality at COP 30 was this: the diplomatic eclipse of the European Union and its Member States in the concert of nations.

Madam Speaker, while DJ Barbara Butch has managed to get her cyberbullyers heavily convicted, other victims of death threats or violence have their complaints left unaddressed or their victim status denigrated. Because yes, to violence against women is added this institutional and media violence that selects its victims according to their political etiquette or the supposed populism of the context of violence. That a rapist is a clandestine who had nothing to do on our soil does not detract from the fact that Claire Geronimi is a victim who must be listened to and protected as much as a left-wing victim raped by a native European. The fact that Marguerite Stern or Dora Moutot are "TERFs", or more simply women who think that a man will never be a woman, does not lower the value of their lives. The fact that Nemesis activists believe that immigration threatens women’s safety – which is factual – should not allow them to be beaten at demonstrations. The left sows violence and hatred in politics. When you give "facho" to all those who defy your ideology, you put a target on their forehead. It's not even freedom of speech you're threatening anymore, it's women's lives, and women's lives.

Mr President, a stab in the back of our farmers: This is what Emmanuel Macron brought to COP30. While our farmers are struggling to make a living from their work, he is now rather in favour of the agreement between the European Union and Mercosur. In other words, it is ready to open the doors of our market wide to unfair competition from Brazil or Argentina, where environmental standards are non-existent and production costs are ridiculous. This agreement is the planned death of our beef, poultry and cereal sectors, already strangled by burdens, bans and rising costs. As the Commission and Paris sacrifice our campaigns, tons of hormone-treated meat will cross the Atlantic. We reject this asymmetric free trade, which destroys our farms and our food sovereignty. We demand that safeguard clauses be applied and that imported products comply with the same rules as ours. Commissioner, when will the Commission stop betraying our farmers and put a definitive end to this agreement?

Madam President, for too long the European institutions have been drifting towards a gender ideology, which denies natural gender differences, blurs benchmarks and threatens women's rights by suggesting that every man can be a woman. The European institutions claim to focus on people’s problems without ever providing real sustainable solutions – here it is a report on gender equality. However, the late awareness of abuses prompted the UN Commission on the Status of Women to universally condemn surrogacy and to call for its abolition in September 2025. In Europe, we are still a long way off. Ditto on security. In November 2024, a UN report found that 90% of migrant women on the Mediterranean route were victims of rape. Will you understand that fostering migration means exposing women to sexual violence? We propose a resolution that defends real equality, not ideological equality, that protects women from violence, precariousness, pornography, surrogacy, transgender abuse of children and migration insecurity. We want a Europe that protects women, not a Europe that gives up naming them.

Madam President, the COP 30 to be held in Belém, Brazil, in the heart of the Amazon is already shaping up to be a new high mass of climate hypocrisy. Thousands of politicians, NGOs and lobbyists will take a private jet to explain to people that they need to change their behaviour. Meanwhile, the major powers will continue to massively exploit their fossil resources. China will build coal-fired power plants and the European Union will stifle its own industries with taxes and standards that are impossible to meet. For years, these COPs have followed one another and the same hollow speeches are repeated. Empowering Europeans, multiplying unsustainable promises, funding green bureaucracies, but never addressing the real causes of environmental disruption. Behind the big words, it's always the same logic: offshoring our production, importing more, depending more. Ecology, the real one, is not decided in air-conditioned hotels in Belém. It is built in our territories, with our farmers and engineers, our companies. It must rhyme with sovereignty, realism and common sense, not with guilt, globalism and economic ruin.

Mr President, once again the European Commission is playing firefighters. And the title of this debate, I quote, 'Defending press and media freedom in the Union', is ironic, to say the least, when we see how it organises the massive surveillance of European digital technology. While Google is fined a record 2.95 billion euros for abuse of a dominant position, the true effects of which are still unknown, the same Commission continues to entrust our sensitive data to Microsoft, as is the case for the European Health Data Space. We pretend to punish the digital giants, but we unroll them next to the red carpet. But the most serious are the methodical attacks on freedom of expression. With the Digital Services Act (DSA), the European Union delegates to private platforms the power to censor without judge or contradiction. And with every check, it assumes the right to open the private messages of 450 million Europeans. Not public content, no, but personal messages and exchanges of video photos between relatives. So what kind of freedom are we talking about here? The one that doesn't bother the Commission? The one who says nothing or thinks well? The real urgency is not to sanction a search engine to correct a facade, it is to defend what generations of Europeans have ripped off: the right to say, to challenge freely, to express oneself without fear. Today, this right is threatened by the Union itself.

Mr President, the common agricultural policy under von der Leyen is: ever-increasing conditionalities, a punitive ecology and a reduction in agricultural budgets. To these constraints is added today a major danger: the trade agreement with Mercosur and the end of tariffs with Ukraine, which put our farms in violent competition with imported products that do not meet our environmental and social standards. It is a real abandonment of our peasants and our food sovereignty. However, we often hear on these benches elected right-wing denounce this agreement. But when it comes to taking action, those same elected officials will refuse to vote on the motion of censure tabled here by Jordan Bardella against M.me von der Leyen, main promoter of Mercosur. Protecting our farmers requires consistency and courage. We must stop the double talk and vote for censorship to turn the page on this anti-farmers committee. To the Republicans, I say it clearly: If you save Ursula von der Leyen again, we will make it known everywhere. In each rural constituency, farmers will know who chose to defend Mercosur and who, like the National Rally, opposed it.

Madam President, Emmanuel Macron and his unrealistic ideology have struck again. His government imposes absurd bans on the use of plastic containers, including reusable ones, in French canteens, while European law allows and strictly regulates them. Paris has chosen to further distill the poison of degrowth and environmental psychoses by over-transposing regulations to the detriment of French companies and producers. This policy, inspired by a fair ecologism, affects our industrial SMEs, our farmers and our local authorities, while creating distortions of competition. Worse still, it does not bring any real gain for health or the environment. The same containers are still allowed in hospitals, prisons or fast foods. The result: plants threatened, jobs destroyed, French products replaced by imports or alternatives often less sustainable and more expensive. Instead of defending our companies and industrial sovereignty, the Macron government chooses to punish those who produce and work in France. It is time to put an end to this regulatory overbidding, to give French industrialists the freedom to innovate and work. Does the European Commission ever plan to address this overregulation, which is causing distortions in an increasingly unbalanced European market, plant closures and the death of our farms?

Madam Speaker, the elderly are by far the most likely to commit suicide. The older the age, the greater the risk. The suicide rate for those over 85 is twice that of the average population. While youth suicide legitimately challenges us, shocks us and immediately calls into question how we think about our policies and visions for the future, the suicides of the elderly are forgotten. So don't lie to us anymore. Even if you organize world seniors' days, they are no longer considered anything but balls. Economic bottlenecks, because their pensions burden our budgets. Professional buttons, because the older you get, the less you have the means to adapt to the new digital tools. Political bottlenecks, because they are afraid of change. They do not interest anyone, except thugs who see in them prey easy to defraud, to strip, sometimes even to rape, as we could discover recently in Niort, France. So, they are created sanitized exclusion zones, called EHPAD, where they are not always well considered, well treated. We pass increasingly lax laws for assisted suicide, transforming places of care into places of death. So, before any hypocritical celebration, let us question our social reflexes that exclude our great and great-grandparents, pillars of associative life and transmission, out of financial flows and therefore discredited. Loneliness and collective disinterest are the problem that prevents effective old age politics. The humanity of a society is measured by its interest in the most fragile, the smallest and the oldest. Creating a long chain of solidarity and collaboration between them, which breaks this general poverty where everyone only frequents their social, cultural, economic and generational caste, will be the challenge of the next fifty years in Europe. This Europe that refuses to have children and isolates its elders. Before any political project, we need a human revolution, a rebalancing of our values so that all individuals, even when their economic performance is lower, are considered. Older people in Europe are not budgetary variables, but the standards of the values of our younger generations.

Mr President, this summer, 16,000 hectares went up in smoke in Aude, France. Farmers and winegrowers have lost everything: their land, their crops, their tools of work. The fruit of a life reduced to ashes. Still, the vine and clearing are the best Canadairs, no offense to the bobo left, who thinks that nature can self-regulate. To this anarchy in the maintenance of nature was added another, equally revolting: More than 2,500 partygoers from all over Europe organized a rave party in the heart of the calcined land, illegally. On these fragile soils that could have been reborn, they trampled everything, further aggravating the distress of the farmers. This is the reality: When our peasants cry, the state abandons them, alone in the face of fire, then alone in the face of anarchy, this complacency. Our campaigns are not empty fields for marginals. They are the beating heart of the nation. They deserve protection, respect and recognition. Because behind every field, every vine, every farm, there are families, traditions, a history that is transmitted. And when we trample our land, it's not just hectares that we destroy, it's whole lives that we sacrifice.

Madam President, as draftsman of the opinion of the Committee on the Environment on the future CAP, I am delighted to have been able to vote to end this unhealthy competition between agriculture and the defence of our environment. For us, the line is clear: defend our farmers, our breeders, our terroirs, and guarantee their future in the face of foreign competition that tramples on our unique and more virtuous agricultural rules and traditions. Although public opinion is changing, including in this Chamber, the European Commission is preparing to force through the agreement with Mercosur, which directly threatens our agricultural sovereignty and sacrifices the quality of our production. We fight against this treaty and, at a minimum, for the inclusion of mirror clauses, and defend this simple common sense measure: our farmers first, before South American meat shipments, which break prices, degrade quality and destroy our local jobs. Without this, there is no food sovereignty, which is the original objective of the CAP. I repeat it here loud and clear: No credible CAP without protected borders! No ambitious CAP without putting our farmers, especially young people, back at the centre! With the National Rally, we will fight to the end against this agreement with Mercosur and against all agreements that betray our peasants and threaten to make them disappear.

Madam President, every human group rises morally when it politically organizes the protection of the smallest and weakest. Europe can therefore be proud today of having worked to its greatness by caring for its children, especially those who have had the misfortune of experiencing sexual predation. Equipping our police forces and our courts, which have to take care of the victims and confront their executioners for them, is a happy thing. Part of the task could have been facilitated by adding in the report the automatic expulsion of foreign pedophiles. However, we can regret here the passage forced by the ideological clichés of the moment. I am thinking of the legal possibility of using legitimate blocking of child pornography files to censor other parts of the Internet, but I am thinking above all of adding the notion of consent. What sexual consent are we talking about when we talk about minors? Already legally complicated for a major, why apply it to children? As a matter of principle, with a child, there is no consent to the sexual act. Consent is precisely the argument of "loverboys" in the Netherlands or "grooming gangs" in the United Kingdom. Indeed, some young minors wanted to leave with their predator whom they loved and who fascinated them. Would the notion of consent have protected them? No, quite the contrary. So the principle is simple: No sexual consent when talking about children, it's just a crime.

Madam President, the European Union claims to want to improve water management, but it does so from above, by multiplying standards, rigid objectives and bureaucratic constraints. It is not a reform, it is a recentralisation. However, optimism may be in order. The European election has reshuffled the cards and the decreasing religion of the left has lost followers in our midst. The deletion of any mention of the disastrous Green Deal in this text is a sign of political victory. Let us not forget, however, a truth that must be recalled and hammered: water management cannot be uniform. Each basin, each river, each region has its specificities. It is not up to Brussels to decide how much water a farmer from Occitanie or an industrialist from the Valley of Chemistry in Feyzin can use. Water must be managed locally with the actors on the ground. It is a question, in law, of subsidiarity and, in practice, of intelligence. To add administrative layers is to standardize the law and penalize those who produce, innovate and guarantee our sovereignty. Yes to water protection, but no to technocratic centralization. Let us trust territories, science and those who live the reality of a land where they were born, where they live and through which they sustain themselves. In other words, on the issue of water management, leave us our oxygen!

Madam President, on 19 March, Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul and the main opponent of President Erdoğan in the 2028 presidential election, was arrested on the delusional grounds that he would run a criminal organisation. Despite this, Mr Erdoğan will continue to be Mr Erdoğan’s partner.me von der Leyen, who will continue to send him European money. But why would anyone be outraged here? On the basis of suspicion, without condemnation, the Romanian presidential election is cancelled, and you applaud it. In Germany, we are thinking about activating the courts to ban the AfD, and you will applaud if it succeeds. Yesterday, in France, Marine Le Pen, the favourite of all polls, was deprived by a small committee of politicised judges of competing in the presidential election – and with her millions of French people were silenced – and you applauded. You are not democrats, but aristocrats whose power falters, and that is what drives you crazy. Democracy frightens you as much as the people disgust you. We, the people, love him and we will always defend him against your miserable manoeuvres! Marine Le Pen will not be silent, and all democrats and peoples must stop being silent and defend their freedoms today against your manoeuvres!

Your question is so outrageous that it makes you laugh more than anything else. In this case, I have no problem; I think that indeed we are very privileged in this European Parliament. This trial is very unwelcome, given that I have been a woman named Marine Le Pen for years, who may become the first woman President of the Republic in France. This is therefore quite unwelcome on your part. I think we are women on an equal footing with men, so I am against the ideology of gender, which is to make us sorts of sub-men or derivative men. Women are unique and singular, and I campaign for their singularity.

Mr President, as we celebrate women's rights in Europe and around the world, this figure fell yesterday in France: the number of victims of sexual violence in transport has increased by 86% in ten years in Île-de-France. To speak only of populations of interest to the left, 90% of migrant women crossing the Mediterranean are victims of rape, according to a UN report last November. In a world where 1 in 8 women in the world have already been raped or sexually assaulted as children, the fact that men do not take a deconstruction traineeship, financed by public money, the same money that is missing to install maternity or gynaecological services in all our territories, is more a matter of left-wing elucubration than of sensible feminism. Defending women’s rights is not about imposing dogmas; it means ensuring their safety and dignity in the face of real threats, and also having the lucidity to recognise that some cultures are openly misogynistic. When I say that, I am obviously not talking about a fantasized European patriarchy. So my question, widely shared by millions of women who are waiting for change in their daily lives, is: What do we have to do with your smoky proposals on gender theory, gender transition support or inclusive writing, when millions of women are afraid to go out even on their own streets?

I am somewhat confused by your political response, which is therefore to invest in schools, which is an educational reality, but which will in no way stop imported violence. Because I think we are talking about one of the countries where the level of investment and care for the growth of children is important – this is the case, I think, in Sweden. In this case, all the figures speak for themselves and show – not only in Sweden, for that matter, but all over Europe – that, yes, this violence is largely imported, do not mind. I know.

Madam President, Sweden, once one of the safest countries in Europe, is now ravaged by the violence of immigrant gangs. In 2023, Sweden recorded 363 count-related shootings, resulting in 53 deaths. The rate of homicides by firearms is four per million inhabitants, compared to an average of 1.6 in Europe. No other country on the European continent has seen such a dizzying rise. Criminal violence, shootings, bombings, corruption, social fraud and pimping, the whole range of crime is ensured with perpetrators recruited sometimes from the age of twelve. The Swedish authorities themselves admit this: This criminal explosion is the result of decades of migratory blindness and predominantly Islamist communitarianism. In 20 years, the foreign population has increased from 2% to 15%. An upheaval that favored the rise of ethnic gangs like Foxtrot, Asir or the Syrian network, gangrenous to the courts and extending their threat to Denmark, Norway or Finland. A situation comparable to many other European countries, including France with its DZ mafia, where the law of crime replaces the law of law and justice. Faced with this threat, Sweden is finally beginning a turning point with the expulsion of foreign criminals, the deprivation of nationality for binational offenders or the tightening of asylum. Europe must take the example of this post-traumatic political awakening. Let us apply strict control of national and European borders, let us have a double border, and let us begin the end of generalized laxity, zero tolerance in the face of delinquency. Let's not let the mafias take over institutions, human lives. Let's act before it's too late.

Madam President, the rise of cryptocurrencies is a major challenge for our States and for the European Union. These alternative systems, often outside the control of central banks, must not compromise a fundamental principle: the monetary sovereignty of nations. Money is an indispensable sovereign attribute to ensure economic stability and protect our citizens. Yet, while Europe is questioning itself, other countries are making great strides. The United States, for example, does not merely regulate these new technologies; they support, develop and use them as a strategic lever of influence on a global scale. For their part, China and other powers are investing massively to establish their digital dominance. In the face of this, Europe cannot remain stuck in a culture of gold-plating. Of course, it is essential to ensure a safe, transparent and respectful framework for our values. But to regulate without acting is to accept to suffer. We need to change the paradigm. Let's invest in digital technologies such as blockchain, support innovative companies and encourage the emergence of competitive European solutions. Our economic and monetary sovereignty is at stake. We cannot let outside actors impose their rules, dictate their standards and enslave us to technologies they control alone. Let us be ambitious, let us build a Europe that dares, innovates and asserts itself as a world leader. Yes, the future of our sovereignty will not be written in wait-and-see; Europe must be strong, visionary and bold.

Mr President, at the end of the COP16 on desertification held in Riyadh, 12 billion have been secured by 2030 to improve land, ten of which come from the Islamic Development Bank. In an international gathering, petromonarchies came to the rescue of sand deserts, deserts where sometimes ski slopes are built, despite all environmental and economic concerns. Here, once again, is the demonstration that to environmental problems, which are localized problems, one cannot have a globalized answer. COPs are gatherings for the release or creation of financial funds, in no way places for reflection and the provision of environmental solutions. So, on the major problem of desertification and soil drying, let's have a local vision and solutions. Water management is a sensitive issue that differs from country to country and sometimes from region to region in the same country. Last year, in the north of France, crops suffered from too much rain, the exact opposite of the Eastern Pyrenees, which lacked permanent water. If you refuse local treatment to operate only on a European scale, let's take common problems. In Bulgaria as in Guadeloupe, 60% of the water is lost as the infrastructure is dilapidated and leaky. Similarly, encourage reforestation, the replanting of hedges to promote the capture of water by the soil. In short, rely on those who know their environment best, namely the peasants, rather than on the financiers of the petromonarchies to solve our problems of water and desertification in Europe. Local problem, national solution.

Mr President, to date, the so-called ‘environmental solutions’, mainly supported by the left, which is more prophetic than scientific, have had as their only options only degrowth or greenwashing, disastrous solutions to bring down temperatures. Their failure on the issue of energy, with their ill-advised anti-nuclear stance, which requires the use of wind – and therefore gas and coal – should have served as a lesson for us. Their praise for photovoltaics, which requires, for example, the removal of more than 50 hectares of forest on the Balerne plateau in the Jura, is also madness – which was fortunately stopped by the prefect. You want to lower the temperatures? Stop clearing, stop concreteing. Concreteisation of our daily environments is one of the major causes of the city’s thermometer panic in Europe. Montreuil and Bagnolet, cities held by the far left and environmentalists, have cleared an entire forest island, arguing ‘A tree torn out, a tree replanted’, and forgetting that the power to capture carbon is much greater when the tree is in full maturity. Let's get environmental issues out of the clutches of ideologues. In-depth technique and knowledge are the only keys to success for this collective challenge, both in our urban and rural environments.