Debate contributions by Sarah KNAFO

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, when 92% of our data is stored outside Europe, when our digital infrastructures comply with American law, it is our hospitals, our administrations and our businesses that become vulnerable. And, Mrs von der Leyen, in the meantime, what is the Commission doing? Regulations, standards, forms. As the others move forward, we regulate. Yet we know how to do it. The Rafale are exported to all continents. Mistral runs on French servers. Our shipyards build all over the world. We have sovereignty in our hands. Just decide to use it. Buying from us when it comes to defense shouldn't even be a question. Our armies cannot depend on foreign authorizations, updates blocked in Washington, spare parts that we are denied at the wrong time. So, Mrs von der Leyen, the billions you are announcing for defence, if they go to the Americans, it is not sovereignty, it is submission. Sovereignty is also food. A continent that no longer produces what it eats has already given up its freedom. Farmers are reminding us this week: With Mercosur, we choose a continent that consumes, instead of producing. The Europe I want is the one that produces, invents, decides, not the one that chatters, regulates and comments endlessly on the decisions of others.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, Mercosur, dermatosis, PAC. Three words, three sufferings for our farmers, one common denominator: the European Union and its bureaucracy. Yet cultivating the land promised a life of freedom, close to animals, nature and beauty. But you have bureaucratised agriculture to the point of asphyxiation. The French Strategic Plan for the Common Agricultural Policy is 1 036 pages – 9 volumes, 7 annexes. Farmers have to fill in up to 30 forms, which change almost every year. For example, in the GAEC form 8 called ‘biodiversity’, the farmer has to declare his lines of ‘non-productive edges’. What is a non-productive border? It is the ‘linear wooded or herbaceous area to limit ... leaching which is not used for production ... but may, by way of derogation, be mowed or grazed provided that it remains distinguishable from the parcel of arable land to which it is adjacent’. I'll spare you the rest. This is for a single box of a single form. I have just tabled a resolution to remove these environmental conditionality rules as a matter of urgency. I say ‘urgently’ because I am thinking of the French farmers affected today by dermatosis who still have to comply with all these rules in order to be entitled to the CAP. Let’s go back to the raison d’être of the CAP: to enable Europeans to produce food for Europeans. It is a matter of sovereignty and food security. Agriculture is as strategic as nuclear. Farmers deserve better than this diminishing ideology, they deserve better than this unfair competition, and when they remind us of this, they deserve better than the gendarmes' tear gas for any response.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, you spend your days denouncing Trump and our dependence on the United States, and you are now accepting that European public money is financing American military equipment. I'm telling you: If you buy American, you will remain under American tutelage. It's as simple as that. Because any U.S. defense equipment, any U.S. component remains subject to U.S. law. Washington can block a delivery, prohibit an update and even oppose the operational use of the equipment. In other words, you buy material that does not belong to you. That is why France, the only nuclear power on the continent with an exceptional army, has a historic role to play in Europe. To buy French is to buy sovereign. Our defense industry is one of the only ones in the world capable of designing, producing and exporting high-tech equipment from A to Z. Dassault, Safran, Thales: This know-how does not depend on Washington. He was born in our factories, our design offices, our sovereign choices. He was born because France, for decades, decided to master its defense itself. Only one example: our nuclear attack submarine Suffren, it is more than a hundred French companies, 2,500 French mobilized and 1 million pieces assembled, all sovereign, from the first to the millionth. This is what a nation produces when it decides not to depend on anyone. It is the most successful alliance between politicians, military, engineers and industrialists, the very expression of a French genius in technology and industry. Why do Indonesia, India and the Emirates buy us our Rafale? Why is our reputation in this field indisputable around the world? Because, since General de Gaulle, we have respected a simple doctrine: respect for sovereignty. Military Gaullism has also bequeathed us a principle: The defense of a nation is its survival, and survival is not negotiated between bureaucrats by qualified majority. It is not up to the Commission to dictate our military capabilities. It's not M's.me von der Leyen to send our sons to the battlefield.

Madam President, Mrs von der Leyen, we no longer expect anything from you and you still find a way to disappoint us. After the energy crisis and the renewables fiasco, we were waiting for you to question your policy, but you are going even further. After the explosion of the cost of your big loan, we were waiting for you to come back to your senses, but you are now proposing an aberrant budget of 2 trillion expenses. After your moral lessons on the rule of law, we were waiting for you to send your texts with Pfizer, as justice orders, but the rule of law is not for you, it is only for others. After the election of Donald Trump, we were waiting for your anti-trumpism to lead you, for once, to defend our interests, but you gave in without fighting and now you sign Mercosur while overregulating our own activities. Mrs von der Leyen, looking at you, I do not even know if you understand what I am saying to you. You'll never change. An ideologue will remain an ideologue. A technocrat will remain a technocrat. The only thing the people of Europe expect from you now is your departure.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, with each reform of the CAP, new words, new acronyms, more paperwork, more standards, and less income for farmers. Our farmers are key strategic players, more valuable than all the minerals and cars you sacrifice them against. These magnificent workers of the earth, you neglect them. Worse, you mistreat them: by means of standards, and by imposing unfair competition on them, as you are still preparing to do through the treaty with Mercosur. You're banning sugar beet processing, but you're going to lift tariffs to import 16 million tonnes of sugar. You are blaming farmers for standards that do not exist anywhere else in the world – on the size of their barns, their lighting and ventilation, on their cows’ passports and the time they spend in the meadows – and you are going to lift tariffs on 99 000 tonnes of beef! Within a week, parliamentary business stops for the holidays. You will take a rest that you feel well deserved. Farmers will not go to the beach. Their summer will be harvesting, hay, shredding, ploughing, sowing, bringing water to the cows and, of course, filling in the paperwork that the bureaucrats will peel at the start of the school year. Without the common agricultural policy there would have been no European Union, and without farmers there would be no Europe. To help them, let's free them!

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, is it reasonable to lend money when you are over-indebted yourself? Clearly, no. Yet, despite EUR 687 billion in debt, the European Union believes it is so rich that it enjoys being lavish in distributing our money around the world. But to whom do the EIB and its 4,000 employees lend our money? To find out, let's look at his activity report. It is entitled ‘Priorities for Prosperity’. Alliteration is soft on the ear, but the figures, unfortunately, are bitter for the taxpayer. Of the €88 billion committed last year, more than 10% was invested outside our continent. Thus, we can pride ourselves on financing projects with picturesque hues and postcard-like appearances. We were able to support a mattress manufacturer in Mauritania, or offer €2 billion to sub-Saharan Africa – all to build ‘a future of diversity’. Another priority: climate, which takes 57 % of the funds. Small problem: on 84 pages, nuclear energy, the only fully controllable and decarbonised energy, is mentioned only once, to congratulate Germany for giving it up. Our companies want lower taxes and lower standards. They want orders. They do not need us to play bankers.

Mr President, EUR 2 trillion, we are asked to vote EUR 2 trillion to finance electricity networks until 2050. One wonders naively what can justify such expenses, when Europe has already been electrified for a long time and our electricity consumption has not increased in the last fifteen years. I give you the explanation: Ladies and gentlemen, politicians, it's your fault. You have abandoned nuclear power and installed wind turbines and photovoltaic panels everywhere. But nature being what it is, you never know when the wind will stop blowing, nor the sun will shine. So you have to add more and more wind turbines, distribute them everywhere and then add gas power plants, and all these production sources that only work 20% of the time each, you have to connect them to each other. So let's go, let's spend billions on cables and high-voltage networks. The bottom line is that when the wind blows and the sun shines, when all these installations, most of the time unproductive, suddenly start to produce all together, then we do not know what to do with excess electricity. That doesn't matter, nothing stops you, you conclude that it takes even more interconnection for Danish wind turbines to be able to send electricity to Sicily and for the Spanish sun to send electricity to Vilnius. A madness that will engulf billions by spreading pylons, concrete and copper everywhere for nothing. These are the reasons for your flight forward. Instead of recognizing your fiasco, you're trying in vain, for billions, to make an inherently dysfunctional system work. Remember this saying: Error is human, but persevering is diabolical.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, if unfortunately we were attacked tomorrow morning, would we be able to intercept 200 missiles fired simultaneously to avoid the complete destruction of our cities? The answer is no. Anti-missile batteries deployed in Europe do not even cover 10% of our territory. France, yet the best army in Europe, as it proves again this week at the Paris Air Show, has fewer anti-missile batteries than a country like Israel for a metropolitan territory that is 25 times larger. Because of the unforeseeable politicians who governed us, we lack tanks, drones, helicopters, artillery, ammunition, aircraft carriers, frigates. Above all, we are failing in our duty of power and therefore of protection. From now on, even the most Atlanticist of you have understood, we can no longer depend on the United States. Mr. Trump, at least, tells us without pretense: Get out of the way! So, ladies and gentlemen, you who believed that wars were behind us, you who argued that military spending should be reduced, you were wrong. I'm telling you on June 18: Today, you have no more excuses. You have to hear what we've been telling you all along. Let us arm ourselves, protect ourselves, defend ourselves.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, did you know that the European Union's debt had just risen by 32% in a single year, or almost EUR 110 billion in additional debt? We already know your favorite solution, the creation of new taxes: carbon allowances on fuels, taxes on packaging, taxes on everything that moves. Since you've spent so much, you're about to tax us. It would be enough, however, of a remedy of common sense. I'll help you with that. You could start by removing a few European agencies that now have a combined budget of more than €18 billion. In 1974, there was only one European agency, Euratom. Today, there are 43. You have been creating more than one agency per year for 35 years. Is Europe doing better? I must tell you that so far we have managed to do without the Community Plant Variety Office, the European Agency for Disease Prevention, the European Institute for Gender Equality, and so on. You could also cut back on the Commission’s administrative expenditure – another €7.2 billion. That's more than Dassault Aviation's revenue! This means that with the same resources, some manage to build the best aircraft in the world while generating profits, while others use this huge sum to pay 32,000 civil servants in Brussels with the objective of offering us standards as if it were raining: standards on filling canned tomato cans, standards on the number of flashes per minute of car blinkers, standards on plastic caps that must remain strictly attached to the bottle, etc. This forward flight is not inevitable. Deficits are not inevitable. The plundering of our citizens' money must no longer be an inevitability.

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, we have been witnessing an unlikely scene for two months. The most fervent Atlanticists in this assembly suddenly discover that Washington must no longer be relied on. Even those who kept quiet when Barack Obama tapped European leaders, even those who said nothing when Joe Biden prevented the construction of French submarines in Australia, even those who came to tell us today that we can ultimately only trust ourselves. You discover independence through anti-trumpism. We did not wait for the name of the tenant of the White House to know that we had to defend our country ourselves. General de Gaulle has been telling you this for seventy years. Our nations have a duty of power. We cannot rely forever on a country whose vital interests are located in an ocean of our own. Be careful, however, do not replace one addiction with another. The European Commission will not defend you. The defence of a nation is its survival, and survival is not negotiated between bureaucrats, by qualified majority. Do not give Ms von der Leyen the power to send your sons to the battlefield. We have to rearm, and we don't rearm a nation with bankrupt public accounts. A war economy is not a machine that throws our money out the window for the benefit of countries around the world. If we want to win the next war, we must first win the war against waste, waste and budget disorder right away. Our rearmament must benefit exclusively our military industry. If you buy U.S., you stay under U.S. tutelage – it's as simple as that. France, the only nuclear power on the continent with an exceptional army, has a historic role to play. For the nations that would like to place themselves under our protection, it will be necessary to contribute and give France the necessary means, because power requires means. On the other hand, our nuclear deterrence will never be shared with anyone, because power is not shared, power is not delegated, and security is not outsourced. It is up to us to take on the effort, or it is up to us to prepare to pay the price.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, we are faced with two major historical movements: one is technological, artificial intelligence, the other is political, the wind of freedom blowing over the West. However, our regulations, such as the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act and the MiCA Regulation against bitcoin, are at odds with these movements. You send back to the world an image that is both technosceptic and liberticide of our continent. If you see technical progress only as a threat, then innovation will happen without Europe and even against Europe. Let's do things in order. Innovation must precede regulation. Without innovation, we will have neither prosperity nor sovereignty. Without innovation, we will always have Emmanuel Macrons to offer our health data on a platter to Microsoft. We no longer want an absurd system where the government sprinkles our companies with subsidies while burdening them with the highest taxes in the world and while offering our most strategic public procurement to American companies. Let's show our youth that they don't need to go to the United States or Asia to write history. We want freedom, energy, markets, less taxes, capital and brains. Let's dare to be free! Let us trust in the genius of European nations.

Mr President, Commissioner Séjourné, ladies and gentlemen, we are here to discuss the initiative launched by the European Commission on competitiveness. To rely on the Commission to make our companies competitive is to hope that an arsonist suddenly becomes a volunteer firefighter. The Commission aims, I quote, to 'make standards-setting processes quicker'. Companies don't need you to produce standards faster, they need you to stop producing them. When one of Europe's first entrepreneurs, Bernard Arnault, begs to stop stifling the industry, it may be a sign. But to tackle the administrative complexities, the Commission suggests instead to create a new category of enterprises, with medium-sized enterprises with between 250 and 1 500 employees. One more category, that's what we were missing! This is how bureaucrats simplify. You know how to add, but you don't know how to throw. You're compulsive accumulators. So if you want to be credible when talking about competitiveness, start by removing the Green Deal. Then, remove 80% of the standards you've created over the last 30 years. At that time, Europe was not anarchic, growth was stronger, public finances were healthier, societies were more orderly. Do you want to improve competitiveness? Take a long vacation.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, three years ago, on the other side of the Atlantic, the President of El Salvador decided to invest in cryptocurrencies for his country. At the time, he was dismayed by the political class and the IMF. He now has a 100 % added value, i.e. hundreds of millions of dollars available for his people, for the security and sovereignty of his country. The whole world is now preparing to take advantage of this decentralized finance revolution. Donald Trump, meanwhile, will constitute a strategic reserve of bitcoins for the United States. Jerome Powell, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, is now talking about "digital gold". Bitcoin is exploding. And what is the European Union doing? The European Union is squandering our money in implausible waste. It continues to accumulate tragically inflationary deficits. It insists on regulating, taxing and curbing. It's time to change the paradigm! It is time to protect our peoples from inflation and the poor economic choices of our states. It is time to say no to the totalitarian temptations of the European Central Bank, which wants to impose 1 digital euro entirely at its hand. We do not want this dystopian world, where a European bureaucrat will tomorrow be able to ban us from certain transactions and even eliminate us from the banking system in one click, for simple comments made on social networks or for an opinion that displeases. It's time to bet on freedom. It is time for our states to invest in bitcoin to build up national strategic reserves. It is time to develop the mining industry. We, the French, have the cards in hand with our nuclear asset. Let's stop taxing more and more holders of cryptocurrencies. It is their intelligence, their risk, their sleepless nights that have enabled them to build up their savings. Let them protect themselves from the crazy gear you have created: public deficit that drives money creation, that creates inflation, that leads to chaos. Let's dare to be free! Let’s stop being afraid of our shadow. Let us remain faithful to the ambition of our civilisation.

Mr President, there are times when we must put politics aside and, without ulterior motives, side with freedom, talent and courage. We rarely have the opportunity to be unanimous in defending the same cause, a cause that really deserves no debate, but a unanimous vote. This opportunity extends its arms to us today, because a great writer has just been arrested in Algeria. This great writer is Boualem Sansal. He received the Grand Prix de la Francophonie and the Grand Prix du Roman from the Académie française. It embodies the denunciation of totalitarianism, the power of literature and faith in the truth. He is a committed intellectual who fights what all of Europe should fight. And it is this man who has just been arrested by the Algerian state in an outrageously arbitrary manner. So if Europe does not defend Boualem Sansal, who will? Irrespective of any ideology, by abandoning our divisions for a single vote, we may have the power to save the freedom and probably the life of a 75-year-old man who needs us and who we sorely need. Colleagues, I call on you with all my heart to urgently demand the release of Boualem Sansal.

Madam President, Mrs von der Leyen, you are well aware that the peoples of Europe have no interest whatsoever in this election of Commissioners. And I want to say to your face, Mrs von der Leyen, that it is your fault. Through low-spoken arrangements, small partisan calculations and technocratic hypocrisy, you have succeeded in disgusting the citizens of the European institutions. They don't even want to know who is going to be appointed commissioner today, or why. They know in advance that these Commissioners will be in your image, in the image of what you have done for Europe over the past five years: a stifling, dangerous, sclerotic Europe. I want to tell these millions of voters that, for the next five years, I will not let you do that. You will not make our continent an uninteresting and soulless space, where your technocratic whims make the law and dictate morality. Together with all those in this House who are committed to truth and freedom, we will break the silence in your institution. You'll probably win this election, but we'll make you lose everything else. In the next five years, we will not give you any respite. We won't let you operate undercover anymore. We will be the spotlight on your actions. Europeans need to know the truth. They want it, they need it, and they have a right to it.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, we are passing through Brussels and we are wondering: "Am I still in Belgium?" You arrive in Strasbourg and, on the tram, you find yourself holding your phone very loudly, with both hands. We walk along the street that brings us home and that we know by heart, but we can't help but look behind and hurry. You may be on the left, but you have experienced these feelings. If you are too blind to admit it, your children admit it, and they suffer from it. We feel dispossessed. We're not at home anywhere anymore. It was not us who left our country, but it was as if our country had left us. However, it is not over yet. However, it is not too late. We are suffering from an evil whose cure exists. It is immigration that has transformed our countries, and it is not an incurable disease. Do we have borders to watch? Either. Dozens of countries do it, we have done it for centuries, and just get back to it. Five hundred thousand new immigrants a year, that would be impossible to stop? This is not true. They are only residence permits, simple documents that our officials take care to stamp and offer to foreigners. Just ask them to stop. It is as simple as that. If foreigners under OQTF refuse to leave voluntarily, they will no longer have a choice. We decide who we welcome and who we expel. Politicians hate this common sense. They say that there are locks that prevent us, that we do not know the file. Their solutions to them are so much more elaborate: Don't change anything. If we find common sense right away, in a few years we will have a hard time believing that we could have let ourselves go to this point and fall so low. But if we do not recover, historians will long seek why such great peoples, so powerful, have allowed themselves to die without reacting. There's still time. Let's do it again.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, for writing The Gulag ArchipelagoSolzhenitsyn had to leave his country and go into exile in the United States. For challenging British colonization, Gandhi was sentenced to six years in prison. Today, it is not in Moscow that the founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, was arrested, but at home, in Emmanuel Macron's France. It is not in Cuba that Elon Musk is prevented from making Twitter a space of freedom, but at home, in Brussels, in Ursula von der Leyen's Europe. At home, the civilization that should protect freedom of expression, better: who invented it, that Europeans are muzzled, intimidated, punished. For us, the right is silenced, censored on social networks, harassed by justice, associations and even banks. It is in my country, France, that the television channel C8 has just been banned from broadcasting in an almost general silence. It is in my country that young influencers are banned by Instagram, without any explanation. It is in my country, the country of human rights, that the public audiovisual service, financed by our taxes, decides who speaks, what we talk about and how we talk about it. However, I tell you, we do not make opinions disappear because we make their expression disappear. The more you attack us, the more we will be. You can censor us, but you can't censor reality. What we can't see on television because of you, we see on our streets every day. You will not prevent Europeans from thinking, you will not prevent Europeans from living, you will not prevent Europeans from saying to you: We will always prefer Tocqueville to Thierry Breton, Elon Musk to Ursula von der Leyen, freedom to censorship.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, today you wanted to talk about anti-Semitism. Jean-François Revel said: "To judge a political regime, count the corpses." It's time to stop talking and counting. Sebastien Selam, killed by Adel Amastaibou; Ilan Halimi, killed by Youssouf Fofana; Jonathan, Arié and Gabriel Sandler, Myriam Monsonégo, all killed by Mohammed Merah; Sarah Halimi, murdered by Kobili Traoré; Jeremy Cohen, beaten to death by a whole gang; Mireille Knoll, killed by Yacine Mihoub. The list is still long. Jews who died because they were Jews on French soil and by the hand of assassins whom France itself had welcomed. Then the Jews leave. And how sad to see so many people who love Europe leave it, when so many people who hate it arrive there every year. This time in history, the culprits are not to my right, but to my left. And it does not surprise me that Rima Hassan is not in the Chamber when it comes to anti-Semitism. Yes, it is you, you who welcome anti-Semites and complain about the rise of anti-Semitism, you who do not admit that Islamism rhymes with anti-Semitism. And it is a granddaughter of Jews from Morocco who came to take refuge in France who tells you. Today, Jews are asking themselves again: Can we still be Jewish in Europe? All the patriots in this Chamber ask you: Will we still be able to be European in Europe tomorrow?

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, today, whatever your nationalities or your parties, you are going to tell the people of Europe who you really are. Are you at the service of these peoples or are you their executioner? Millions of Europeans are demanding freedom. Are you going to deprive them of another five years? Or do you want to tell them that you believe in them, in their intelligence, in their creativity, in their future? To Mrs von der Leyen, I ask: ‘What did the Europeans do to you to treat them with such contempt?’ Ms von der Leyen, you have no promises, but you have a record. Do we really think about solving our problems with those who created them? We will therefore vote three times against it. No, because we vote for those who defend freedom, never for those who trample it. No, because we vote for those who guarantee prosperity and never for those who precipitate decommissioning. No, because we vote for those who protect Europeans, never for those who expose them to immigration and Islamisation. So it will be no, no and no! Don't be a politician, be a European. We are the civilization of freedom. Prove it.