Speeches

Madam President, it is a beautiful coincidence that on the last day of this Parliament we celebrate 50 years of the first day of Portuguese democracy and we also celebrate the liberation of Italy from fascism. And these memories, this remembrance, this history, must remind us all of the tasks that remain to be accomplished in order to build more complete democracies, more integral democracies. That means fighting today for all the rights that were only won in my country at that time: political rights, the right of association, the right to strike, but also social rights such as the right to health, education or a decent pension. Let us continue to fight these battles, because it is only in the construction of a more demanding democracy, with more rights, with more rights for all, that we are able to fight the forces that want to bring us back to the past. Let us remember this in the next campaign. Let us remember this in the next term of office.

Mr President, in this term of office we will have the beautiful coincidence of having the last day of work of this European Parliament on the day that marks the first day of Portuguese democracy, 50 years ago. In a democracy, we cannot accept this conservative wave that wants to take away women's rights, which we thought were irreversible. We cannot accept that workers may be afraid to organize or strike because they have precarious ties and no rights. We cannot accept citizens without access to basic rights, such as health or education, or living in poverty. We cannot accept that people are fired or persecuted for talking about the genocide in Palestine. Therefore, commemorating April 25, celebrating democracy, today, is not a mere exercise of nostalgia or memory about what fascist dictatorships were in Europe. Here we have representatives of these dictatorships and the confrontation is taking place today. To make this confrontation is to make a commitment to a fuller and more demanding democracy against the fascists of today.

Mr President, Parliament has been a force in this process for increasing the scope of the disability card, for ensuring that it is free of charge, in the specific case of the disability card, for ensuring information on platforms accessible to people with disabilities about their rights, and also for ensuring that disabled people's organisations are represented. Parliament therefore played a very important role in these negotiations, which pushed this compromise in the right direction, against what was a much more restrictive position on the part of the European Council. I think we should now reflect on how to go from here to get more rights. It is true that the disability card will ensure an elementary principle of independent living, which is access to mobility and, in this case, to international mobility. But we also need to ensure that, in all Member States, these services, these facilities, these transports, are much more adapted than they are today. The truth is that the paradigm of independent living is not yet predominant in disability policies in the European Union and must become the main focus for all Member States. And for this, it is also necessary that European Union funding for disability policies be channelled to this paradigm of independent living, so that all persons with disabilities can be effective and whole citizens. And that's a choice we all have to make.

Mr President, the proposal we are discussing today has inspired a speech by the Commission and also by Parliament, which is a festival of misleading advertising. We are told that these rules will be less procyclical, that is, better suited to facing economic crises, that they will promote investment and that they will increase the democratic legitimacy of fiscal policies. Each of these statements is false and directly contradicts the content of what we are voting on here. Spending becoming the key variable for reference trajectories is a bias for fiscal adjustments to be made through cuts, as happened in times of austerity, harming public services and public policies in general, and public investment in particular. And that is why the second statement is also false. The troika's programmes have led to historically low levels of public investment in the countries where they have taken place, and the same will happen once a grip on public spending is established, without any measure to protect public investment. Therefore, continuing to call for the social and green objectives of the European Union and the investment needed to meet them is sheer hypocrisy. And on democratic legitimacy, budgetary strategies will be defined by the Commission and, in case of disagreement with the Member State, it is the Commission's trajectory that will stand. And so what happens is that the troikas have returned and, this time, they are definitive. In the past, countries still received loans. Now they're just gonna take orders.

Madam President, as has already been said, this report has been drawn up in consultation with LGBT movements and it is very important that this is a principle that guides all Union policies, because these movements work against discrimination, often in the most difficult contexts, and work so that all families can have the same rights. And that's the difference with the extreme-right. Those who defend LGBT rights do not do so against any kind of family. But there are children in the European Union who are orphaned and cannot have a family because same-sex couples, who could adopt them, are rejected. Destroying the family is like this. There are fathers and mothers who lose recognition as fathers and mothers of children who have educated their entire lives because there are countries where this parenthood is not recognised. Destroying the family is like this. There are young people who are expelled from their homes and banished from their families because of prejudice. Destroying families is like that. And there are young people who commit suicide by hearing speeches like the ones we hear here or are murdered by people who hear those speeches. Destroying families is just that. On 7 June, one of the days of the European elections, we will mark 70 years since the death of Alan Turing. Alan Turing was one of the most brilliant minds of his time, who put his mind at the service of the Allies in World War II and was later tried and convicted of homosexual acts and subjected to chemical castration as an alternative to a prison sentence. That, 70 years later, it is still possible for European citizens to be subjected to treatments for homosexuality is a shame for all of us. That in the next European elections we can take the first step to put an end to this shame and many others. No kind of love, no kind of family, attacks any other European citizen. It is discrimination that kills.

Madam President, in 2020, the European Commission published the First LGBTQI+ Equality Strategy. This strategy was considered a historic milestone and received with hope by LGBT people and movements. That strategy must be effective and not just a statement of intent, and this report goes in that direction. I would like to begin by thanking the rapporteurs of the other groups, staff and the assistants for the work and commitments we have made together. We begin by stating that discrimination exists outside the law and within the law. In some Member States, discrimination is part of the state with tragic consequences. In others, we have seen advances in same-sex marriage, civil unions and parental rights, the right to self-determination, autonomy, equality before the law. These advances didn't destroy the family, they didn't harm anyone, they didn't collapse society, they just made it more inclusive. But formal rights do not guarantee everything. Across Europe, hate speech is growing and some of it is directed against the LGBT community. An ILGA report concluded that 2022 was one of the most violent years on record. Hate speech has direct consequences, including on the incidence of suicides of LGBT people, particularly young people. As this report demonstrates, the rise of hate speech is directly linked to the emergence and growth of far-right forces and groups. Interestingly, here in Parliament, these groups have not even bothered to present rapporteurs for this report. But hate speech is never just speech. From words quickly to deeds, from hate crimes to hate laws. That is why we welcome the Commission's initiative to add hate speech and hate crime to the list of European Union crimes. However, we need more. We want a work programme to encourage the reporting of these crimes and the training and awareness of police forces and judicial authorities about their gravity and implications. We also want a Europe-wide ban on violent practices that are still allowed in some Member States. This is the case with so-called conversion therapies, authentic programmes of physical and psychological torture, genital mutilation or forced sterilisation. It is important to think of LGBT strategies at the level of various public policies and not just as a niche. The degradation of public services harms everyone, but it particularly harms groups that are discriminated against, such as the poor, racialised people, women and LGBT people, especially when they accumulate several of these discriminations. I was rapporteur for the rules of economic governance and I can only express my concern about the new wave of austerity policies that is being prepared and will not fail to have an impact on public services. We need to address the housing crisis and introduce measures to combat discrimination against all marginalised groups, including the LGBT community. The Fundamental Rights Agency reports that 20-40% of the entire homeless population is LGBT. This report had a paragraph entirely devoted to health that was withdrawn. It noted the impact of violence and stigmatisation on the physical, mental and sexual health of LGBT people, condemned discrimination in access to healthcare and made it clear that health should be a universal and free public service. Tomorrow, in the final vote on the resolution, we will try to reintroduce that paragraph. I call for Parliament to be united in advocating non-discriminatory access to health. We must continue to have a Commissioner for Equality and become a coordinator for LGBT rights in the European Commission, with a mandate to ensure the implementation of the strategy. And Europe needs a new LGBT equality strategy, this time with concrete, time-bound and measurable goals. We want a new strategy before the 2024 European elections! Let's do it!

Mr President, this report is part of an attempt to give more and more weight to deregulated finance and capital markets, to the detriment of regulated and capitalised banking. Moreover, this trend adds to the tendency to tie states and their ability to promote public investment, fuelling the illusion that an increasingly deregulated and increasingly volatile financial system can compensate for this disappearance of a state with a strategic sense. This proposal has real aberrations when it determines which funds could have gigantic and unprecedented levels of leverage and which could even lend up to 20% of their capital to a single borrower, meaning that the default of a single borrower could lead to the bankruptcy of an investment fund. It is an irresponsible proposal, in a line of financial deregulation that has already produced disastrous results in the past and will not fail to produce disastrous results in the near future.

Mr President, it was ten years ago that the European Council adopted a resolution on traineeships within the European Union. That resolution is not binding and, therefore, many Member States have continued with exactly the same practices, which means that, throughout Europe, there are young people who continue to have to live at the expense of their families while gaining experience, because they are not paid for the traineeships they are able to obtain. Those who do not have families that can support this path of beginning their professional activity have to give up their projects and the investment they have made in their qualifications. Ten years after this Council resolution, Parliament has finally succeeded in adopting a proposal for a directive to ban unpaid traineeships and ensure that they are of effective formative quality. It would be a tremendous disappointment if the European Commission and the Council did not respond positively to this challenge by making a directive that is really binding and not a new resolution ten years later, now disguised as a pseudo-directive.

Mr President, one of the causes of drought in the Algarve will undoubtedly be the advent of climate change. However, that is not the only reason why we are witnessing a water disaster in this region today. The fact is that the Common Agricultural Policy has established ecosystem services and the sustainability of agricultural holdings as criteria for granting subsidies and support. But in Portugal, subsidies continue to go only to large producers, including intensive monocultures, which are incompatible with the characteristics of the territory. On the contrary, small farmers continue to see, both from the point of view of support and subsidies and from the point of view of access to water, while the current government implements measures, blind cuts in water use, which are deeply unfair and ineffective from an environmental point of view. We need a more responsible funding policy that takes the territories and the most sustainable forms of agriculture seriously.

Mrs Miranda, first of all, our solidarity with Galicia and its people for what has happened. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the answer. In fact, you said the mayor of Muros is here. We wanted to know if there was support from the Galician Government, because, in the Portuguese press, there were reports that the cleaning was being done by the municipalities, by environmental activists, by sailors, but with very little support from the Galician Government, and I wanted to confirm that this is the reality.

Mr President, when the process of revising the rules of economic governance was initiated, the Commission promised that we would have new rules that would promote public investment, respect the sovereignty and democratic choices of European citizens. All misleading advertising. These rules have a set of criteria, but the key – which guides countries’ fiscal trajectories – is expenditure. In other words, let us go back to the time of the programmes of containment and spending cuts, which have failed, throughout Europe, including in the size of public accounts. And above all, the rules do not have a single clause protecting massive public investment, which the Commission says is necessary – and is, to respond to social problems and the climate challenge. The only thing that exists is an exception clause for deviations from the trajectory, which requires authorisation from the Commission, which the Commission will assign at its discretion. In fact, it does not make much sense to talk about new rules of economic governance, because what we have before us is only the granting of an unprecedented discretionary power to the European Commission, which can impose trajectories on countries, even when the trajectories proposed by governments meet the criteria set out in the rules. It will be able to decide at its discretion which countries are entitled to the national escape clause, it will decide on the investment exception in case of deviations, and it will also decide – and this is very significant – that when a government implementing austerity policies is defeated at the polls by its citizens, the next government will be obliged to meet the same budgetary targets. We are talking about respect for democracy. Do you want to understand why the far right is growing in Europe? Look at these rules.

Madam President, this report is a good example of the habit, which has developed, of under-regulating the financial system, doing enough to be doing something and not doing enough to be effective. This is the case for energy derivatives – a sector that already had impacts on energy prices and people’s portfolio, but had aggravated impacts in the context of the war in Ukraine. Although some positive proposals have been adopted at this level, they are emergency proposals, which do not solve the structural problem in the energy derivatives market, which has had very negative impacts on the increase in energy prices and thus on the household budget. And it is a pity that the regulation of the financial system, and particularly derivatives, always falls short of what is necessary, creating a game of cat and mouse between regulator and regulated, in which those who aim to defend the public interest are always running far behind. It is also true that conflicts of interest in payments to brokers have been resolved and that is a good thing, although what existed before – we agree – was rather grotesque. It is also true that transparency rules have been introduced in these markets. But all this is very little, especially in view of the costs that citizens have had to bear because of the deregulation of these markets.

Madam President, the alliance between the Socialists and the right-wing groups to return austerity policy to the European Union must also pass through the Council. And the Council will have to assess whether it even wants to go back to the time when austerity policy has produced negative results at all levels, including on the sustainability of public accounts, and also whether it wants to go back to the time of the suppression of the policies of democratically elected governments, which we had during the troika memoranda, by attributing unprecedented powers – discretionary powers and absolute powers – to a European Commission that has learned nothing from the last crises. If you do, you are only ensuring that a large part of the Member States of the European Union will become a protectorate of the European Commission and you are ensuring that the principle of equality between Member States will fall, as we well know that a discretionary power of the European Commission to impose restrictions on budgets will not apply in the same way to France as it will to Portugal or Greece. It is the principle of equality between states that is at stake, but also the capacity that states will have to respond to the challenges that the European Union itself poses to us: the energy transition and the fight against climate change and social Europe.

Mr President, three years ago, this Parliament adopted a legislative own-initiative report aimed at introducing minimum standards of decency in remote working relationships, protecting family life, protecting working hours, the mental health of workers and seeking to prevent labour abuse. It was not a perfect report, but in the 25th hour, an agreement between the socialists and the right created a manoeuvre to sabotage this legislation, a period of three years for there to be an agreement between the social partners, which was expected to be difficult because of the positions of employers, and this was confirmed. Employers boycotted this social agreement and now we are on the verge of reaching the end of the mandate without fulfilling our commitments to workers to pass this legislation. It is therefore important to urge the Commission to come forward with a proposal as soon as possible, but it is also important that this Parliament should shoulder the responsibilities of having accepted this postponement and of having compromised the entry into force of such important legislation.

Madam President, the Left Group proposes this debate in Parliament, in Parliament's plenary, because the revision of the rules of economic governance is an issue that will decisively affect the future not only of economic policies, but, by extension, of the response of social policies, environmental policies and energy transition, social policies, the fight against poverty, public services, health and education. Therefore, the debate on the rules of economic governance is not a debate of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs and it is not understandable that it is done in haste and covertly in that committee. If these rules impact the relationship between the European institutions and democratically elected governments, if these rules determine – and will determine – the future of European democracies, if these rules bring back austerity policies with full force, then citizens have the right to know what the positions of all groups and all parliamentarians are.

Madam President, the European Parliament's report on mental health in the world of work has shown that new technologies, distance communication, have brought risks from the point of view of labour rights that we thought were guaranteed, namely the right to have a working time, a working day that has a beginning and an end. But it also showed us that the system of Big Brother The work that is taking place in many of these forms of work or forms of work, such as platform work, creates enormous pressures on workers’ mental health, especially when many of these forms of work are insufficiently regulated or even treated as individual entrepreneurship. The report that Parliament adopted here posed a challenge to the Commission: the challenge of moving from declarations of intent on this increasingly dramatic reality to multi-level legislation to protect the mental health of teleworkers, platform workers and other forms of work using these technologies. We do not need commitments from the Commission to say that it is attentive to these realities. We need the Commission to respond to the challenges that have been launched by the European Parliament to pass legislation. We don't need words. We need action, we need rules, we need regulation, because we cannot trust employers to do it alone.

Madam President, according to 2022 data, there are 21.6% of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion in the European Union. In this context, with more than 100 million people affected by this scourge, the Commission's target of 15 million reduction in the number of poor by 2030 is even embarrassing, but even more embarrassing is that these numbers have not fallen in the short term. This strategy is used to set goals for the end of the decade, because we know that those responsible will no longer be here when it is necessary to evaluate this strategy. What we do know is that the numbers are not going down and, with this monetary policy that has pushed up house prices, with the deregulation of labour rights, which has been promoted by various committees and by various national governments, with the promise that they will eventually raise wages and with the effects of the fiscal policy that is being announced - if the Commission's proposal for the new rules on economic governance is approved, we have, on the contrary, every reason to think that the problem of poverty will get worse. To all this, the Commission has responded with a pillar of social rights that has virtually nothing binding, only declarations of intent, leaving all responsibilities to the Member States, including the responsibility to prevent a race to the bottom on labour and social rights. The Commission, moreover, opposed the proposal for a minimum income - a directive on minimum income - which, fortunately, was supported by this Parliament, but also here, without practical consequences. If we want to talk seriously about the fight against poverty, we have to talk about serious policies, we have to talk about financing social policies and public services and we have to talk about changes to the rules of economic governance, which make the fight against poverty the central objective not only of niche social policies, but of all the economic and social policies of the European Union. Otherwise, it's just talk.

Mr President, the first problem with this regulation on European green bonds is that it refers to the taxonomy, which means that we will have green bonds to finance natural gas and nuclear energy. The second problem is that the application of this regulation is voluntary, which means that we will continue to have green bonds that do not comply with what is set out in this regulation for green bonds, which is a curious form of regulation. And the third problem is that the certification will be done by private agents, similarly to what happens with the agencies of rating, with the known results. The President of the ECB defended this proposal. It would be better if the ECB and, by the way, the European Union stimulated public investment, which is the only way to drive the energy transition: public policies, public responsibility, and not the financialization of the environment, which has failed us so far and will continue to fail.

Madam President, the European Parliament serves to discuss European solutions in its competences for housing; it does not serve governments to atone for the sins of their own inaction. It is not worth coming here to complain about market failures, a government that maintains the deregulation of the rental market approved by the right and that led to rents skyrocketing in Portugal. Who comes here and who has always defended the independence, the mandate of the ECB, the current monetary policy of the ECB has no moral to come to complain about the destructive consequences of that policy. I note, moreover, that the Socialists have come here to ask the ECB not to raise interest rates any more, not to lower them. In other words, they have come to ask the ECB to do what it has already announced. A government that boasts of having put forward the most moderate proposals in the world, that is, proposals that do not pinch either the financial system or the real estate business, has no morality to ask the European institutions to have the courage it lacks. Instead, we need other proposals, proposals to limit rents, to ban the purchase of housing from non-residents and to prevent the financial predation of banks.

Mr President, we are here to discuss a directive on the misuse of letterbox companies, an expression which suggests that there is good use of letterbox companies. It doesn't exist. The shell companies serve to promote tax evasion, when they do not serve for worse things. And so what we should be discussing here would be a much stronger proposal to put an end to this instrument of promoting tax fraud and tax evasion. Unfortunately, we have in the European Union political groups and governments that are opposed to all measures to combat tax evasion, often because governments themselves are interested in promoting this phenomenon. And that is why we have a proposal for a weak directive from this Parliament, an even weaker proposal from the Commission and a Council, or rather some states that do not want any proposal at all. We will support Parliament's proposal, as we have supported in the past, because it is better than nothing, but with the full awareness that we all need much more.

Madam President, for decades liberal economic policies have managed to bring about an extraordinary shift from income from labour to income from capital. In the same period, according to the IMF, taxation went the same way, ever softer on capital income, ever heavier on labor income. And today, the ultra-millionaires of this planet flaunt utterly obscene fortunes, announce their tourist trips to space, while here, in the European Union, millions of citizens live in the most abject poverty. And now we still have to listen to right-wing parties, coming from countries where there are two million poor people, complaining about the persecution and discrimination that are being waged against the rich. What a shame! If there are those who create wealth and those who create wealth are those who work, it is time to give workers a greater share of what they have produced.

Madam President, anyone who listens to these debates may always think that everyone in this Parliament is very concerned about tax evasion, tax avoidance and tax fraud, but that is not really the case. This is a debate that divides this Parliament and it is enough to see the positions that right-wing groups systematically take on the issues of tax evasion. First, never say the names of the rulers, the companies, the governments, the countries that promote the evasion and the dumping It does the opposite of what the Pandora Papers did, hiding what the Pandora Papers revealed. Secondly, as we are currently seeing in the DAC 8 report negotiations, we are preventing – and have been preventing for years – the sharing of information on information holders, holders of income, real estate or financial assets, so that we can follow the money trail. To what extent registration is indispensable to be able to effectively combat tax evasion and also, as we saw recently in the reports on the regulation of cryptocurrencies, create trapdoors so that we can not detect transactions that are made in cryptocurrencies, thus enabling one of the main instruments of tax evasion at the present time.

Madam President, anyone who has an unpaid internship is paying to work. You have expenses, you have already invested a lot in your training, and if you do not have a family to support you, you will often not be able to access this possibility to start your working life. That is the reality of hundreds of thousands of young people in the European Union. And the debate we've had here is an example of a certain policy. fake This is a bit fashionable, which is to say that we agree with the objectives of this proposal, but then put forward – as the right-wing and far-right groups have put it – amendments that either empty the proposal, or cause the proposal to move from being a directive to a statement of intent. Both are ways of saying something publicly, while sabotaging the same thing where it really counts. So let's stop politics. fake. Anyone who votes to empty this directive or not to make it a directive is voting to keep it all the same. So do not deceive young people, because young people will be attentive and we will tell you who voted and how in this debate.

Mr President, the inflation crisis and its causes have clearly shown the limitations of competition policy and discourse in the European institutions. Today, we know that it is at the level of profits and cartelisation in strategic sectors that is the most dynamic factor behind inflation. And yet the Commission has been recording, monitoring, flagging, showing concern and doing absolutely nothing. In reality, this is not a new fact. Competition discourse and competition policy in the European Union only serve to limit public development policies, including in areas that are elected as priorities, to reduce industrial policy to tax incentives to those who already pay less taxes and to privatize public companies, limiting the action of those that have not yet been privatized. Privatisations that, incidentally, were at the origin of the same highly concentrated and cartelised sectors, which give rise to the inflation we are witnessing. And this debate, moreover, a debate on competition in which only state aid is mentioned, is quite the expression of this ideological bias.

Mr President, at the Porto Social Summit, and in the months before and after it, very ambitious proclamations were made about the European Pillar of Social Rights. But the truth is that in many debates, this pillar, a term that promised much in the future of European construction, has proved to be a very fragile pillar. First of all, in the modest objectives that have been set for combating poverty, but also in the weak response that has been given by so many governments across Europe to this already modest challenge. But there are also other contradictions that we must resolve if we are to be serious about building a social Europe. We need to have economic governance rules that make it possible to combat poverty effectively, giving way to the public services and social policies that these policies deserve. We also need to bet on a return to a labour market marked by rights and not by the precariousness that we have seen, which means that millions of European full-time workers, despite working full-time, remain poor.