Debate contributions by Aleksandar NIKOLIC

Mr President, two months ago, the Chief of Staff of the French Armed Forces, Fabien Mandon, supported by Emmanuel Macron, said that we had to agree to lose our children in order to go to war. These remarks are shocking, but above all they show a worrying lack of anticipation about what the war of tomorrow will be, and even what it already is. Today, a multi-million-euro tank is destroyed by a simple drone, barely worth a thousand. Today, dozens of soldiers die helplessly in a few minutes under a rain of grenades dropped by small drones. Tomorrow, only poor or downgraded countries will send their youth to die. The major powers will fight with land, naval and air drones, for the sake of saving lives, but also for efficiency. Ukraine and Russia each have 4 million drones, China 8 million. The United States is planning an additional 1 million per year to close the gap. And we, France, the first army in Europe, ordered only 1,000 in 2025. The war of tomorrow will be decided by the number of 4.0 factories, which we will have, not by the number of standards or the number of kids who will shed their blood.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, before you fly to the other side of the world in your social cocktails in Belém to discuss your new carbon taxes and your renewable energies that will further explode energy costs and your future delusional standards, I will bring you back to something very concrete. We have just learned that France has broken a sad record this year. In one year, there have been more than 60,000 business failures, including 6,800 in September alone. Our SMEs are the most impacted, with an increase of more than 13% in procedures in 12 months. It is simple, we are witnessing the slow death of our jobs and our productive apparatus, in short, of our future. We were promised a Europe of peace and prosperity. We finally have a real third-worldization of France, as our short-lived Prime Minister Bayrou said. Macronists, socialists and republicans, you have entrusted our future to Brussels technocrats above ground. This is your record. Your COP30 will only make the problem worse. I hope that between two cocktails in Brazil, you will think of the thousands of business leaders and employees you sacrifice. For they will not forget you in the ballot box.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, you are talking about cooperation with Africa and African partners, but above all you are paternalistic about this great continent. A real commercial relationship requires the search for common interests, mutual development, equality. But you are not looking for any of this, you enslave a continent by flooding it with aid and investments for which we will never see the counterpart. You are not even able to negotiate the takeover of the illegal immigrants we want to expel. Worse! As you said earlier, you are facilitating legal immigration. Brussels takes money from the French and Europeans. It distributes blindly, in purely local projects that should be the responsibility of African states. By putting this continent under tutelage, you are not developing it, you are submitting it. As in the time of colonization, you impoverish Europeans and infantilize Africans by curbing their emancipation. You support them in the idea that their future is either to wait for European money or to immigrate to Europe. Believing that Africans must be systematically dependent on Europeans as big children is akin to the worst of racism. Racism of contempt.

Mr President, sport is alive. I'm going to talk to you about something very concrete. On Sunday, a week ago, I was playing football with my son. Then, on his way home, he said to me: “I would like to see a match, too.” We put on the TV and there was the AS Roma match against Hellas Verona. He asks me: "Which country?" I said to him: "They are Italians." We see the players of Hellas Verona and he asks me: Is he an Italian? Is he an Italian? And I myself realize that in fact, there was only one Italian left in the team of Hellas Verona, at a time when this club is bought by an American pension fund; One more club that is bought by an American pension fund in Series A. But this is what we live in many European countries. So, can we really say that a football club is really from a country if ten players out of eleven are no longer from that country and if it is owned by an American, Saudi or Qatari fund, as at home at PSG? This is the question posed by millions of European supporters, who have less and less reference points. With the Bosman judgment and the Cotonou agreements, the European Union has made sport a market, with money as the sole criterion of competition between clubs, since there are no longer quotas for national players as was the case before. Players and pension funds change clubs and shirts. And the only ones rooted in the midst of this total commodification are the supporters, who in turn are seen as mere consumers. In this report, you are aware of it – and you are also aware of it, because when I listened to you, I often agreed, and it is rare here, in the European Parliament. So, I say, it's true, I agreed. But, as usual, I do not see anything very concrete to make this report have a real impact on sport. Yes, it is necessary that the majority of the capital of a club is held by national actors, like the German model of the "50+1", so that they do not belong in majority to foreign pension funds. Yes, it is necessary to impose a quota of players trained in the country of the club in order to preserve the formation, the proximity and the link with those who follow the sport. We must defend a rooted, balanced and fair club sport, not a hunting ground for investors and countries in need of notoriety. Sport is not a commodity, it is an identity, a culture and a fundamental social bond.

Mr President, what can you be hypocritical about global warming! You are the main cause. In my country, France, 51% of greenhouse gas emissions are due to imports. The logic would therefore be that we develop our national markets and that we relocate our industries to reduce these imports. But Mme von der Leyen makes the exact opposite. After the agreement with New Zealand in 2023, which is, I recall, just 20,000 kilometers from Paris, it has just signed the free trade agreement with Mercosur which, in addition to sacrificing our farmers, drastically increases our imports and therefore explodes our greenhouse gas emissions. That's the main cause of warming! But you prefer to hit motorists or deprive modest families of their gas boilers while imposing ever more expensive electricity through intermittent energies. Shame on you! Want to fight the causes of heat waves? I propose a solution: Leave the power, it would really make us look.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I have just heard you talk about the situation in Bosnia, and you say that it is obviously in Bosnia’s interest to join the European Union. But I want to ask you a question: What is the role of the European Union? What is the objective of the European Union? The European Union is normally a large area that should serve us commercially, that should serve us to be more powerful. This has already been seen in the past, when some countries have been incorporated and their standard of living has not greatly improved – the SMIC in Bulgaria is still at EUR 500. In Bosnia, the SMIC is 400 euros, so the question I ask myself is: by wanting to incorporate countries by imagining that they will live like home, are we not going to live more and more as in Bosnia, precisely, or as in countries further east that you still want to bring in? The situation in Bosnia, which I know well, is of course of particular concern to me, as are all of you. There is indeed a global influence of organized crime and mafias. In Bosnia, there is also the influence of Qatar, there is Saudi influence, there is Turkish influence. Many see it as an area they want to enslave. And I think it is very, very dangerous to bring Bosnia back into the European Union, with this type of country that today has a real influence, which corrupts many people. Because no, we don’t know where the money is going, and yes, I think that today there are a lot of mafiosi running Bosnia.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I do not know if you are keeping the accounts, but you have already given Albania more than EUR 2 billion since 2007. This money, the French and the Europeans will not see it again. And for what result? You admit this yourself in your reports: Albania is plagued by corruption, the freedom of the press is violated, and it is a real hub of organised crime in Europe according to Europol. This country has everything from a rogue state and its accession to the European Union would seriously endanger the security of our nations. By admitting it among us, you open even more doors to the worst of prostitution, big banditry, organ trafficking and mafias. What conclusions do you draw from this catastrophic finding? You want to give them even more: An additional EUR 922 million, EUR 922 million, which we know from experience will unfortunately not change the disastrous situation in this country and will end up partly in the pockets of oligarchs and mafiosi. In which world is a candidate funded to take an entrance exam knowing that he or she is not ready? So I have only one question for you and Ms von der Leyen: who gave you the right to play with Europeans’ money and security in this way?

Mr President, since February 2020, electricity prices have risen by 33%, according to Eurostat. In my country, France, they even increased by 53.85% over the same period. A Frenchman who paid 200 euros of electricity in 2020 must now pay 307 euros in 2025. And in 2026, the rise will accelerate with the ARENH II. Behind these figures that I spread out, there are families who can no longer heat up in the winter and who must monitor the slightest expense, or even cut back on their shopping budget so as not to end up in the red. You could draw consequences from the mistakes in energy production by supporting wind and photovoltaics which turn out to be a mistake, but no, you continue and this text will further worsen the impoverishment of the French people. By supporting the development of decentralized electricity networks in Europe, you know full well that they are not compatible with nuclear power plants, which nevertheless produce clean, affordable and abundant energy that allowed the French to pay for the cheapest electricity in Europe. You assume that you want to replace them with wind turbines and solar panels that are too expensive and work every other day. Finally, you close your eyes to the exorbitant costs that will affect the portfolio of the French and Europeans. Because yes, it will be necessary to connect them, these wind turbines and these panels. And that's expensive. Everything shows that this decentralization raises the price of electricity. In short, you choose to sacrifice our peoples in favor of an ideology as crazy as it is suicidal. We, the MEPs of the National Rally, will always defend the interests of the French and their purchasing power. Don't count on us to help you betray them.

Madam President, a few seconds is the time it took, according to the Spanish electricity grid operator Red Eléctrica, for the sudden disconnection of a few solar power plants to deprive millions of people of electricity. Millions of people who found themselves in the dark, for lack of light, because of these solar power plants. And what does Brussels offer? More and more renewable energies, solar and wind, despite their cost, their lack of productivity and their intermittency that everyone begins to observe. You are snubbing nuclear power and choosing an energy that is too expensive, unreliable and only ideological, while your policies are in the direction of a general electrification, for example with the prohibition of the thermal vehicle, precisely in favor of the electric vehicle. We'll have to choose between the two. You are unconscious ideologues, it is crazy that you do not see this inconsistency! With such lights at the head of Europe, Europeans have not finished being in the dark.

Madam President, the world of tomorrow will probably consist of self-driving and hyper-connected cars. You acknowledge this and plan to facilitate empowerment, harmonise rules and set common standards. However, the real question is: How will these new cars run? You take everything in disorder: you advocate all-electricity, without the French and European industrial ecosystems being ready for it and without the ability to produce affordable and efficient electric motors. By forcing Europeans to switch to electric, you are forcing them to pay more for their car, to charge their vehicle for less kilometres than with thermal, which is more expensive electricity, because of your pro-wind ideology. A hundred years ago, progress – real progress, technological progress – enabled the French to move from the cart to the car. One hundred years later, your ideological progress will force a majority of French people to give up the car, without any alternative. Progress has always allowed humans to live better. Now, because of you, it is synonymous with impoverishment and decline.

Madam President, Europe has invented almost everything: the car, the mobile phone or, more recently, the web. Yet today, she is on her way out of history, relegated to the status of a mere consumer of the inventions of others. The governments of my country, France, have been following your recommendations for 25 years. Twenty-five years ago, France had a trade surplus. Today we have a deficit of €100 billion. We were the fifth country in the world in industrial production. Today we are the tenth. Your pact for a clean industry is one more ideological heresy. For example, you want to increase to 32% electrification by 2030, but you are running away from the only energy that can make us reach this goal: nuclear energy, barely mentioned in your pact. Our manufacturers are no longer able to compete, but you continue to impose above-ground targets on them, such as carbon neutrality in 2050. In reality, with your pact, our industry will be neither clean nor dirty: it will disappear, and we will import goods produced by polluting industries on the other side of the world.

Mr President, we saw this in Mayotte, where France turned to Musk's American Starlink network. Satellite Internet access is a real sovereignty issue. In this sense, Iris2 It is a step in the right direction, but it is only a small step, at a time when the Americans are making giant leaps. First on the number of satellites deployed: 290 planned on the European side, against 7,000 planned on the American side. Then, regarding the timing, we are planning at best a launch in 2030, when the Starlink constellation already has 6,300 satellites in low orbit. This is not a budget problem: 10.6 billion euros planned, this allows us to compete with the almost equivalent budgets of SpaceX and Amazon. But we have to see how we use it, this budget. Launching a European satellite would cost 35 million euros. For this price, Americans can throw 200. And while we're blabbing, they're doing it. To sum up, our satellites, no matter how technological, will be launched too late and too expensive. We have the brains, the technologies and the budgets. In the end, the problem is you. We can't wait to replace you!

Madam President, how much longer are we going to bear the hypocrisy of Mrme von der Leyen and European Technocrats? You criticize the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement on the one hand, but, on the other, you want to accelerate imports of American shale gas. As a reminder, shale gas is obtained by fracturing the soil, that is, by injecting tens of thousands of cubic meters of water under high pressure and chemicals into the rock to release the trapped gas, contaminating the groundwater and ejecting a greenhouse gas, methane, into the atmosphere. It's hard to do any worse ecologically. Moreover, many countries rightly prohibit the extraction of shale gas. Does it not seem incoherent to you to import from the United States a gas that is found too dirty to extract in Europe, to which must be added the greenhouse gas emissions due to its transport by boat? In reality, you don't care about ecology. Do you know why your Green Deal will surely lead to less pollution that is really visible in Europe? This is because after killing our industry and our agriculture we will no longer produce anything in France and Europe. Too bad if the pollution is only displaced, and more important overall, and too bad if our economy is dying.

Madam President, as with the Internet, the cloud and AI, we are once again at the helm of the great powers on cryptocurrency. 10% of Europeans hold cryptocurrencies. In France, they are already 12%, or more than 8 million French. And this continues to increase. What about you? Your first reflex is to be afraid. It is not how to invest in this new technology, the famous blockchain, but how to regulate it, how to tax the profits of Mr. All-the-World and how to control it. Because deep down, this is what terrifies you in the world of crypto: It escapes technocrats. When there is a new technology, immediately you are afraid of it and you want to regulate it. We wonder how to adapt to it and how to benefit from it. Our concerns are: why Europe is no longer innovating and how to use these technologies to boost our competitiveness. Rather than taxing, let's promote investment in European industry and the real economy, encourage crypto holders to turn capital gains into shares in innovative companies, making sure that the future Nakamoto or Musk are European and create disruptive technologies on our soil. Let us finally be a continent of the future. Yes, we must make crypto useful and for that, we must get rid of useless technos.

Mr. Speaker, have you listened to Donald Trump? I quote: "We will lower your taxes, end inflation, increase your wages, bring thousands of factories back to the US. This will be done through tariffs and concrete and immediate measures.” This pragmatism, this enthusiasm, this national preference, it changes from here! A wave of optimism spreads to the new world, and even seduces opponents like Zuckerberg. At home, in our slow-moving Europe, great ambitions have given way to survival. As Americans aspire to a new golden age, we struggle to get out of the Bronze Age in which you We dived in. Europe's priority now is to feed and heat Europeans with purchasing power decimated by years of economic mismanagement. And there is no concrete vision, at the end of the tunnel still no light! To reindustrialisation the European Union prefers the Green Deal, to the digital revolution it prefers censorship (with the Digital Services Act), to innovation it prefers the regulation of AI. A standard has never created jobs. But to hell with common sense, as long as your suicidal ideology triumphs! If it is too early to say whether the American dream is really back, one thing is for sure: We are still mired in your European nightmare. Long live the awakening!

Mr President, Dr Goubad Ibadoghlou, known inter alia for his anti-corruption activism and his criticism of the Azerbaijani autocrat Ilham Aliyev, is now under house arrest and under threat of imprisonment. His health is deteriorating, and his life is in danger. This Parliament took note of Dr Ibadoghlou’s fate and even nominated him as a finalist for the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. He also acknowledged that this particular case was not an isolated one, as Azerbaijan is customary in the repression of anyone who criticises the government. So let's take stock. This country is slaughtering the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, it is trying to destabilise my country, France, in its overseas territories – whether in New Caledonia or Martinique – it is oppressing any form of dissent against its dictator, Ilham Aliyev, and yet, because you have killed our energy independence on the altar of the Greens, Brussels continues to support this regime by accelerating our gas cooperation with Baku. This makes you indirect accomplices of one of the worst regimes on the planet. Looking at you in the mirror, you should be filled with shame.

Mr President, it would not occur to anyone to entrust the management of a fire to an arsonist. So why did we entrust the future of our industry to green ideologues? Years of dogmatism on renewable energy and of many absurd standards have led our industry quite logically into the gap. By dogmatically destroying our industry, you are condemning us to import goods from countries such as China, the United States and India, which together account for half of global greenhouse gas emissions. So you succeed in sacrificing both our sovereignty, the purchasing power of Europeans, but also the climate. Hat down! My country, France, which has deindustrialised more than any other European nation, knows something about this: 51% of its greenhouse gas emissions are linked to its imports. An audit of the impact of the Green Deal on our industry is therefore not only desirable, it is necessary, urgent and vital. But more importantly, it is time, really, to withdraw once and for all from the management of our industrial, agricultural and energy future, please.

Madam President, everyone is wondering whether this or that country is ready to join the European Union, but have you ever wondered whether the Union is still attractive? Poll after poll, the disaffection of the European peoples towards Brussels is becoming more and more glaring. Because of you, Europe is no more than a shadow of itself, and it is no longer a dream. We are colonized economically, linguistically and culturally by the great powers. Once the spearhead of innovation and progress, the EU is now nothing more than a vulgar market to conquer. We are also being colonised on our streets by uncontrolled and, if you listen, uncontrollable mass immigration. Ignored on the international scene, decommissioned militarily, technologically outmoded, industrially blocked, energy-hungry, we have nothing left to sell but cheques and empty speeches. So, rather than talking about enlargement, let’s talk about a real recovery. Yes, let us restore a powerful, prosperous, respectable and respected Europe, which knows where it comes from and where it is going, respectful of what has made it strong: the great nations of which it is composed.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, you are talking about a crisis, so let us talk about the biggest crisis. Yes, let us talk about the migration crisis that is disrupting the European continent, threatening our security and jeopardising our identities. You note in this report that immigration can be exploited by hostile countries. And if you read between the lines, it could be a threat. But what is the European Union doing concretely to manage this migration crisis? You are financing pro-migrant associations and NGOs, including those that are going to look for them off the coast of Libya. Not content with supporting this submersion, you force the European nations to welcome them as part of a distribution throughout the continent, under penalty of being fined 20,000 euros per illegal refused. To stop this illegal immigration, you use the policy of the check with the money of the French and Europeans. You give billions to Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey and for what result? There are 700,000 illegal immigrants on French territory, the equivalent of the city of Athens, the cradle of European civilization. The loop is closed.

Madam President, in May 2024, France was shaken by insurrectionary riots in New Caledonia. We have witnessed real war scenes. Ten people were deplored, including two gendarmes. These riots bear the mark of Baku. As we know, Azerbaijan supported and financed the pro-independence movements with the aim of destabilising France. Today, as Martinique flares up, Azerbaijani influence is proven. On 20 July this year, Martinican separatists went to Baku to join forces under the aegis of Azerbaijan. The Aliyev regime does not hide its intention to punish France for its support for Armenia. And what is the European Union’s reaction to this country that is attacking France and threatening to commit a new genocide against Armenians? Well, the signing of new gas contracts in Baku by Mme von der Leyen and the unworthy words of Mme Simson, who officially welcomed the increased European dependence on Azerbaijani gas. But what a shame! The current leaders of the EU definitely have no dignity. Between two moral lessons, they submit to the worst of autocrats.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, the condemnation of journalist Bülent Mumay is just one more example of Erdoğan censoring the press and arresting secular Turks. It relies on radical Islam, which Ataturk, the father of Turkey, mocked. I quote: "The politician who needs the help of religion to govern is only a coward." Yes, Mr. Erdoğan is a cowardly Islamist, who benefits from your submission. You have been speaking for a while now, but you are maintaining Turkey's status as a candidate for membership of the European Union. You give her billions and you don't even dare question her presence in NATO, as she fights us, colonizes Cyprus and regularly violates Greek borders. In 2020, the Turks even illuminated a French frigate; You know, it's called an act of war. Erdoğan is also waging a hybrid war on us by the Turkish diaspora, officially ordering them to have more children in Europe and not to assimilate. His statements are explicit and warlike. I quote: "Minarets are our bayonets, mosques our barracks and believers our soldiers." Finally, as in Constantinople in 1453, in Strasbourg in 2024, we discuss the sex of angels in front of Islamists who want to fight us militarily, culturally and demographically.