Speeches

Madam President of Parliament, Madam President of the European Commission! I would like to point out that we are witnessing an unprecedented situation in the history of the European Union. No European institution has ever faced such serious issues. During our mandate, both the European Commission and the European Parliament are facing challenges so difficult that we do not really know how to get out of it. It's a bit like the endurance test situation, the resistance test. Can the EU stand it? Is the EU resilient enough? Except it's not an exercise. It's not an exercise. This is absolutely reality. I would therefore like to ask you a few questions. Firstly, taking into account the experience with vaccines, I would like to ask the President what kind of lesson the European Commission is learning from this experience. What worked and what didn't when it comes to covid and vaccines? And in this regard, if we look at today's situation - I just wanted to remind you that we, as a group, have submitted documents to the European Commission, information about what we consider to be the most urgent - I would therefore like to ask you how the European Commission intends to approach the current situation. What are the short-term plans, what are the long-term plans? Does the European Commission intend to carry out what we call in our documents stress test? Reviewing legislation, both existing and in the process of being drafted, in terms of completely new conditions. Does the Commission intend to carry out such stress test and when? Does the European Commission intend to take such a radical approach to budgetary issues when it comes, firstly, to the revision of the MFF and, secondly, to checking how the recovery fund, NextGenerationEU, is being used? Does the Commission intend to introduce measures to better coordinate the reception of refugees within the European Union? Those are my questions. I would be grateful if the President could reply.

Mr President, thank you very much. Mr. Commissioner, I'm sorry. We often wonder whether the citizens of the European Union really understand what the budget is all about. And, in fact, for us it is important what message goes to the residents in a very difficult situation. After all, very many people do not really think about the complexity of the budget, but ask themselves very simple questions: Will there be money or not? Will there be a budget or not? Did they come to an agreement or not? And this is the most important message that the European Parliament, together with the Council, has come to an agreement with the strong help of the Commission. That's the most important thing. And the second question that always comes up: What will the money be for? Will there be money for health care? Will there be money to protect the borders? These are the questions that people ask. Today we can say that we have done everything to answer these questions in the affirmative and we will see what it will look like in the coming years.

Madam President, first of all I would like to thank the Commissioner for the very good cooperation we have and remind all of us that 2022 is the year when we have all the necessary instruments we need to realise the European policies. I mean we have the MFF, Next Generation EU, all the policies linked to the budget, and all of them based on European solidarity and dedicated to more resilience in Europe. Let me express on behalf of the EPP Group what we expect in 2022. We expect, especially in the Commission’s programme, more resilience regarding foreign interference and the attacks on democratic values and our way of life. We expect also reinforcement of our fight against corruption, money laundering, the fight in favour of the rule of law, which is the cornerstone of European democracy. And we cannot forget that in this year, 2022, we will still be fighting the consequences of the COVID crisis, so especially we have to think about the citizens and how to improve their daily lives. The citizens need to be confident and we need to show the citizens that we care about their real fears and their concerns. I think that we can just list some of the elements which are really important for us. All of them are in fact linked to the EU recovery strategy. First, the question of the recovery strategy is mainly about people, and this is mainly about the added jobs, so that’s why we need to reinforce employment, to keep existing jobs, to create new jobs. We cannot also forget the question of the brain drain, which I think is also of interest to the European Commission and this is one of the processes which we can face in Europe and which is reinforced by COVID. We have to take care of the people who lost their jobs, who are losing their normal way of life, who are concerned about their children and their future, and of course the people concerned with their pension and the eldest members of the family. So this is also about the Green Deal and we cannot forget that farmers especially cannot be victims of the Green Deal, and the people living in the big cities. We have to remember digitalisation, which is also about recovery – digitalisation as a part of recovery – so that’s why we have to think about the whole society. We are ready to cooperate with the Commission and to cooperate successfully, and we will support the Commission in all these fields but we will be very active in working with you.

Mr President, thank you very much. Mr. Commissioner, I'm sorry. It is rare for a lack of transparency to produce such negative results. I recall that Parliament has specifically set up its working group to monitor the national recovery plans both at the stage of their approval and at the stage of their implementation. For incomprehensible reasons, two parties in the case of Poland avoid answers and treat negotiations as secret. The European Commission does not want to tell Parliament how the negotiations are going and in no case did it want any plan, in this case Polish and Hungarian. The Commissioner is talking about transparency from the moment of acceptance. We want to know how the negotiations are going. The Polish government does not want to show what the reconstruction plan is about to its parliament. He does not want to show the Poles what the negotiations are about. What's going on, Commissioner, you hear me. In my country, we hear from government representatives and also from colleagues here today that the Commission is in full conflict with the Polish government, that the Commission is blackmailing, that the Commission is conducting a hybrid war with Poland. We've heard today that he's acting like a terrorist. What does the Commission say? What does the Commission say? And what are we to say as Members of the European Parliament, who would like to know what demands the Commission has made on the basis of the rules and what is the response of the Polish government. We'd like to know. We would like to know this so that we can explain to the people of Poland what this whole matter is all about. All the more so because we believe that issues of the rule of law are absolutely crucial, but we really need to know the specifics.

Mr President, first of all, I would like to express my thanks to the Commission and the Council for the work we have done together. We were working on all the instruments like the MFF, like Next Generation EU, like the cohesion policy and the other elements, which will be based on solidarity and dedicated to a more resilient Europe. As a representative of the EPP, I don’t want just to say what we think about the European Commission work programme, but I would just underline some of the elements we think as EPP are the most important. What do we expect? We expect more resilience towards the foreign interference and the attacks against democratic values and our way of life and reinforcement in the fight against corruption and the rule of law. But when we speak about the priorities, the main strategic objectives, there are several we think are most important, but let me just describe it as one main element, which is recovery. Recovery, because for us, there’s some elements which are the basis for the recovery. This is recovery and resilience, this is a question of the Green Deal but also digitalisation. All of them are the part of the main strategic goal, which is recovery. When we speak about economic recovery, we should be concentrating on developing a convincing exit strategy that moves from the more targeted support measures to eventual phasing out and to address the issue of how to deal with the high levels of government debt accumulated during the crisis, and coordination policy removing tax-related obstacles to the single market. When we speak about the Green Deal, we would like to underline the question of the reduction of administrative costs and the regulatory burden and principle in connection with environment policy. When we speak about digitalisation I think we should be concentrating on the question of education, administration, health and all the related challenges. So please, Commissioner, take also our remarks to show that the programme of the Commission is also dedicated and oriented towards the most important goals for the European Union.