Speeches

Mr President, this process will bring to an end useless and counterproductive rules that have harmed the economy as a whole and, in particular, the economy of several Member States of the Union. But the proposal we have here does not make what was one of the key points in the terms of reference of this review: investment protection. The European Commission wants countries to invest more in the green and digital transition, but it does not provide any flexibility mechanism for this to be done, contrary to what was requested by the European Fiscal Board. First proposal: defend, protect, within the framework of the rules, public investment in public services, the green transition and the digital transition. On the other hand, this proposal establishes a permanent redemption scheme. Once again, we have technicians taking decisions that belong to democracy, overlapping with the programmes of democratically elected governments, including defining a macroeconomic trajectory that is, of course, a political choice of the utmost importance. Second proposal: the focus. If we really want to talk about national ownership, if we really want to talk about respect for democracy, then every aspect of each country's plan, starting with the macroeconomic trajectory, has to be defined by that country's democratically elected governments. Third question: the definition of reform and investment plans. In the Commission proposal, the final decision will always lie with the Commission and the Council, creating quasi-colonial power for some Member States and for the Commission over sovereign countries. Third proposal: the final decision should be left to the national parliaments, within the framework of economic policy criteria to be discussed in the European Parliament. Let's put democracy at the center, which is its place.

Mr President, the cryptocurrency market today has a capitalisation similar to that of the subprime industry before the last financial crisis. And that dimension continues to grow, and it will grow even more after this regulation has been adopted and the public credibility given to an industry that is based on 'monopoly money'. But the fact that crypto-assets are joke money doesn't mean they don't have serious consequences. The link between the crypto-asset market and the conventional financial system is growing and more and more households are giving real money in exchange for assets to play with. The regulation proposed here is already obsolete, as the President of the European Central Bank said, i.e. we are adopting a regulation that is already obsolete before it enters into force. Second, it is ineffective because it puts an impossible mission on regulatory agencies, preparing them to become the scapegoats for future financial crises. And finally, it does absolutely nothing – except a small statement of intent – about the environmental consequences of this absurd industry.

Madam President, 15 years after the great financial crisis, what the SVB crisis shows us is that the financial industry is the only one in the world that still cannot stand without public support and public guarantees. Even at a time of tight monetary policy, tight wage policy, tight fiscal policy, there are still no restrictions for banks. The problem is not that states do not do what it takes to ensure the stability of the financial system. The problem is that the same principle is not valid when it comes to people's lives and their rights. And the big question is whether the ECB will also, like the US Federal Reserve, stop to think about its policy, because restrictive monetary policy, we know, played a role in the SVB crisis. The US Federal Reserve will stop to think and the ECB should do the same, because today we know that this restrictive monetary policy is ineffective and entails multiple economic risks, including for the financial system. And the other question is whether the European Union will continue to bet on convergence with the highly securitised US financial system model, or whether it will bet on a more conservative, more prudent system with a strong public presence and serious regulation.

Madam President, during the European response to the Covid-19 crisis there were those who hoped that the European institutions had learned from the disastrous response to the financial crisis. Unfortunately, it seems that this was an unfounded optimism. What we see in this Semester process is that we return to the same discourse and the same policies that marked, after a period of countercyclical policies, the response to the financial crisis. It is said that we will now introduce social and environmental objectives into the European Semester. What you see is anything but this. While some vague statements are being made with no consequences for the Commission's obligations, the Commission is already putting pressure on the Member States and instructing them to cut social expenditure, something to which, for example, the Portuguese Government has already given in with the usual obedience. While rejecting a permanent European investment instrument and calling for immediate fiscal consolidation, the European Commission is calling for more investments in the energy transition. The demands are contradictory, but the latter is also not to be met.

Madam President, the European Central Bank is currently conducting a monetary policy that is contradictory to its own analyses. It is the European Central Bank that has characterised the inflation that we are experiencing as essentially driven by energy, food and economic bottlenecks resulting from the recovery from the post-pandemic crisis. All factors are not very sensitive to traditional monetary policy measures. And not by chance, after several interest rate hikes, the main inflation-reducing effect we are seeing is energy prices. By the way, showing what the right policy would be: limit the absolutely extraordinary and opportunistic profits of energy companies and other companies that are profiting from the crisis, protecting the economy and protecting people. What we are seeing is a real loss of wages, while profits skyrocket. An analysis which, incidentally, the European Central Bank also made when it showed that profits are making a record contribution to the inflation we are witnessing. However, when the ECB warns of the dangers of inflationary spirals, it is only wages that it talks about, wages that are losing value and never profits that skyrocket, which shows that the ECB is a much more political institution than it wants us to believe. The independence of the ECB is this: it is the right to plunge the European economy into recession, in the name of an ineffective monetary policy, for which no one will answer.

Madam President, RePowerEU is just another example of a European proposal that says it will do one thing and, in reality, it will do another. It has served to divert funds from the Recovery and Resilience Fund to objectives opposed to those of the Recovery and Resilience Fund and, coupled with the bleaching of nuclear energy and natural gas, now sold as green energy, will serve to end the little environmental decency that still existed in the use of these crisis-response funds. Meanwhile, the profits of the fossil industry have reached astronomical values supported by people and now also by community funds. They grow in proportion to the hypocrisy of the Commission’s promises and commitments on a green and just energy transition. Who do you think you're fooling? Citizens? They are fooling less and less. And the planet, that one, really can't be fooled.

Madam President, the list of high-risk third countries for money laundering has been a list marked by many criteria of what can be called sympathetically political diplomacy. However, there is a big elephant in the room that is the responsibility of the European Union and the Commission for what is going on inside the European Union. And what successive scandals have shown, Luanda Leaks, Pandora Papers and many others, is that the great risk of money laundering in the European territory is even within the European Union. And this lacks the courage, both on the part of the Commission and on the part of the Council, to hold accountable those countries that remain easy channels for money laundering within the European Union. The list of high-risk third countries serves to free us, not us, the European Union from responsibility for what has not been achieved in relation to its own Member States and in relation to its own jurisdictions. If there is a high-risk jurisdiction for money laundering, it is the European Union itself, let us look inside.

Mr President, ghost companies have for many years been one of the main tools for real companies to evade their tax obligations. The Pandora Papers scandal showed how these companies are systematically used, but it also showed how jurisdictions, including in Europe, favour creating the ideal regulatory framework so that these companies can be used to evade taxes. The Commission presented, because it had to present, in the face of this latest scandal, a proposal to regulate shell companies. But that proposal is an absolutely useless proposal, it was an absolutely useless proposal, which kept a Swiss cheese from exemptions, exceptions and criteria of economic substance very easy to comply with; Moreover, these criteria would have to be assessed by the Member States, many of which are precisely those jurisdictions that promote tax evasion. Parliament's proposal has marginally improved the Commission's proposal, and for that reason alone it will have our support, but the truth is that this proposal is a pause for a reassessment, which has been proposed by the left-wing group, and fortunately, which will also serve to ensure that in a few years' time we will see that we have made very little progress. It is a pity that there is no willingness on the part of the Commission to tackle this problem seriously, and it is a pity that the right-wing groups have preferred to be on the side of evasion.

Madam President, after a response to the pandemic crisis, which seemed to indicate that Europe had learned the lesson of the financial crisis, we are heading back towards a self-imposed recession and economic crisis. The European Central Bank, against its own analyses, responds to inflation by raising interest rates. The Commission regrets the consequences of speculation on finance, distribution and energy, but does nothing to stop this speculation, and governments such as mine freeze wages and pensions, imposing a definitive cut on all people who have lived or live from their work, while offering tax benefits to income from capital. The economic downturn in 2023 is not inevitable. We know which solutions have worked and we also know which solutions have failed in the past. We must reverse the course of fiscal policy and monetary policy in the European Union, otherwise we will have to answer to our citizens because we have consciously and deliberately provoked a new economic crisis in the European area.

Mr President, Commissioner, the Child Guarantee was created to respond to the shameful situation that we have in one of the richest territories in the world, Europe, millions of children living in poverty, without access to adequate food and basic public services. The program is important and well designed, but it doesn't have the resources it needs. It makes no sense, and cannot continue to happen, for the European Commission to announce new programmes, however fair they may be, to require Member States to respond to humanitarian crises, such as the Ukraine refugee crisis and, by the way, also the other crises of the other refugees who have been forgotten, without presenting new resources for these priorities. We cannot have new priorities and respond to new emergencies with the same money as ever or, in the case of the European Social Fund+, with less money than in previous cycles. So if we really want to live up to this demand that is made of us, this demand that is so fair, we need new resources, we need increased resources.

Madam President, Commissioner, the truth is that, throughout Europe, the Member States that subscribe to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, that subscribe to the idea that people with disabilities must be guaranteed equal rights and independent living, basically adopt well-intentioned laws that they have no intention of complying with. Therefore, we continue to witness all kinds of discriminations, exclusions, pseudo-therapies and all kinds of symbolic and physical violence against people with disabilities. It is true that much of these responsibilities fall within the competence of the Member States, but it is also true that we continue to channel a substantial part of Community funding for disability policies to institutions that are totally at odds with the spirit and the letter of what is contained in this report. That funding must come to an end. All EU funding for disability policy must now be channelled into the paradigm of independent living. That is our responsibility.

Commissioner, you spoke about the evolution of deficit and debt, which, as we know, depends on the evolution of expenditure, but also on revenue. I would therefore like to understand why the Commission chooses to use only net primary public expenditure as an operational variable. Because this option has a recessive bias. It was the option, for example, of the Troika programmes, which had disastrous consequences, not only for the growth of the countries affected, but also for deficit and debt developments. And it is also an ideological bias, because it becomes an instrument against public services, against public investment, against public policies in general. And I would like to know the reason for this partial choice.

Commissioner, the Commission is agitating for the relaxation of certain rules which have proved clearly impractical and, therefore, the real balance of this new proposal is the streamlining and even the introduction of sanctions, particularly those linked to the recommendations under the European Semester. That is, these recommendations will no longer be just recommendations but impositions. Now, as many of the recommendations that the European Commission has made over the years concern the reduction of pension expenditure, the reduction of expenditure on public services, the deregulation of the labour market – all of which are the competences of the Member States – I would like to know how the European Commission reconciles respect for national competences, which derives from the Treaties, with the idea that this new form of economic governance will have greater respect for the democratic choices of national governments.

Mr President, DORA is an important initiative to strengthen the resilience of financial institutions to cyberattacks and it is an initiative that, although not as ambitious as we would like, namely in the reporting duties of financial institutions to regulators, goes in the right direction, in the sense of valuing public regulation of the financial sector to protect the financial sector itself and the citizens, who are the first victims of the collapse of the financial system. It is an initiative that unfortunately runs counter to the more general trend towards deregulation of the financial system, which is a real risk for financial institutions and for states and taxpayers. It should be stressed that the financial collapses of recent years had nothing to do with cyberattacks, they had to do with the management of banks and the policy of financial deregulation. And we should have learned those lessons.

Mr President, the REPowerEU proposal has been presented as favouring the energy transition and energy independence of the European Union from other territories. In reality, apart from propaganda, what we have is a tiny proposal in its resources and its financing, which, incidentally, is guaranteed by issuing more permits to pollute, the first contradiction, and changing the already weak guarantee, which we had approved at the time of the Recovery and Resilience Fund, not to cause significant damage, which basically disappears and opens the door, open, perhaps better said, to the return of fossil and nuclear energy. And so, while the European Commission is talking about the magnificent European commitment to combating climate change in Egypt, here in Brussels, the exact opposite is being done, changing dependencies and bringing back everything we said we were going to evade.

Mr President, one of the main economic and social consequences of the war was the return of the logic of austerity. And unfortunately, it is not only in the PPE that we see this return. In Portugal, wages and pensions will have one of the largest reductions in real terms in recent years and the largest decrease in the share of wages in national income in the history of our democracy. And this is the case with the socialist government, with the same government that opposed until the last minute, and will only be dragged, the taxation of the extraordinary profits of energy companies and that has just decided on a reduction in the taxation of large companies. The same socialist government whose finance minister has just supported the increase in interest rates, the EPP is not alone there either, and so what we are seeing is the return, all over Europe, of the revenues that have spectacularly failed to respond to the financial crisis and that are once again being adopted by governments of the most varied political families.

Mr President, the report to be voted on the employment guidelines has some important agreements which improve the Commission's proposal in terms of working conditions, wages, public services and the fight against poverty. It also has other interesting formulations on the role of Parliament in this process and, in particular, on the assimilation of the European Parliament to the Council in all matters relating to the European Semester. But it is in the divergences around this report that we find the most enlightening debates and it is indeed enlightening to see how the European right and extreme right oppose Parliament having a role comparable to that of the European Council and how they argue, for example, that companies benefiting from public support under the RRP or the Community budget can take that public money and transfer it directly to the shareholders, without even having to ensure that the employment and working conditions of their workers are maintained. Therefore, the European right wants public money to be used to finance companies that fire workers and take that money and transfer it directly to shareholders without going to the starting house. And it is also the right that has been hit hardest by highly misleading formulations with regard to pensions, such as those focusing on active ageing and which very poorly disguise projects to raise the retirement age, that is, to allocate to workers the costs that this crisis has generated and that, in fact, have not reached everyone, namely those responsible for them.

Mr President, the pandemic has shown that the digital world of work is far from being the paradise promised at some point. The reality of the dilution of working hours, the separation of work and family life, the reality of abuse, harassment and pressure on workers who are involved in digital working relationships shows the importance of achieving accountability, preventive and after incidents, of employers. And it is very important, and it was difficult, for this accountability to remain in this report. That is why it is also crucial that the right-wing proposals to remove references to the need to regulate the right to disconnect, the need to regulate teleworking and the need to update the list of occupational diseases are rejected. If these amendments proposed by the right were passed, this report, which is already a modest report, would be a step backwards in the fight for mental health in the world of work, and that is why it is important that they be dropped.

Mr President, the report has important references to investment in public care services and the rights of formal and informal carers, with particular attention to the overwhelming majority who are women and, in many cases, migrants. The main limitation of this report is that it does not have consequences for economic governance rules and sufficiently strong consequences for the transformation of the European semester. The Committee on Social Affairs continues to keep abreast of these matters, which are of the utmost importance and without which this report risks being a set of declarations of intent with little political consequence. But we also have differences in intentions, and it is important to look at what the right proposes in its separate amendments and votes that come out of this report: the reference to any legislative proposals, the reference to gender pay inequality, the reference to the European funding line or even the importance of funding public services, and the reference to the non-marketisation of care. And it's important to realize that we don't all agree. There are those who want public care services to support everyone and there are those who just want to take care of the industry.

Madam President, my speech concerns Rule 39 of the Rules of Procedure and the strike by interpreters, whose extraordinarily reasonable demands were distributed to all Members at the entrance to the Chamber. These demands are intended to address the deterioration in working conditions, which is having increasingly serious and widespread consequences for the health of these Parliament workers, and also to address the very serious situation that two committees, AGRI and, astonishingly, AFCO, have already decided to hire external services to stop this strike by interpreters. I would therefore ask the President of the European Parliament, firstly, to immediately stop using outside companies to replace the European Parliament's interpreters and, secondly, to make all necessary efforts to resolve these problems of working conditions, so that we can all work under the best possible conditions, without any consequences for the health of our workers. I stress that the European Parliament should give the best examples in this regard and not copy the worst practices of the worst employers.

Madam President, if there is a problem with the climate ambition of the Recovery and Resilience Fund, it is the lack of ambition and not the successes. Unfortunately, in the Regulation, the principle of crowding out fossil industry funding has not been endorsed and its consequences are already visible in the recovery and resilience plans of the various Member States. And it is curious that those who have in the past contributed to postponing climate goals in the European Union today present this perspective as realistic. If we had fulfilled them longer, we would not be in the dependency situation we are in today. This is a curious realistic perspective. The one that chooses to ignore not only the scientific evidence surrounding the emergence of climate change, but the very extreme weather phenomena that we are already experiencing today, that are already unfolding before our eyes, and that these political forces insist on ignoring and insist on not seeing. They also insist on not realising that the future of the European economy lies in accelerating the energy and industrial transition of our continent. It certainly does not mean postponing this inevitable transition, allowing others to do so first.

Madam President, the execution by the State of Israel of Shireen Abu Akleh would, in any other context, be a worldwide scandal, not least because it was followed by more attacks after the journalist was killed. First, at his funeral for displaying the flag of his country, and then with a campaign of slander in the Israeli press. However, Shireen's autopsy also revealed the hypocrisy of the European institutions and their deafening silence on a matter which, in any other context, would have merited vehement and unanimous condemnation. It must be said that those who condemn some occupations and not others, protect some lives and not others, do not defend peace. Defend one side, cost that support as many lives as it costs. But peace defended Shireen until the day she was murdered. We will never see it again, except in the faces of those who have not stopped resisting and denouncing a criminal occupation. Even without the support and solidarity of the European institutions which so much preach human rights values and so little practice them.

Mr President, the problem of tax evasion by multinational companies has been getting worse for many decades and has benefited from the support of right-wing political groups and countries whose public finance models are based on the expropriation of tax revenue that belongs to other states by law. This opposition, moreover, was very clear, both in the negotiation of the OECD agreement and in the debate on this report, in which it was chosen, because the right has made it a point to do so, simply by stamping the OECD international agreement. This agreement is an important precedent which, we understand, only happens because of the growing threats, or even concrete, unilateral measures, taken by states to protect themselves and their tax revenue from theft by other Member States, in the case of the European Union, or simply states. But it is a very imperfect law, which has been divulged with a very misleading advertising campaign and which we will have to revisit when it shows up and when it becomes clear that it is deeply insufficient. The precedent is important. The law will have to be greatly improved.

Mr President, the European Union's major competition problem is today being felt in the pockets of all Europeans by the uncontrollable rise in energy prices. The European Union did not deal with the energy transition when it had the time and money to do so. It pressed the Member States, those that could be pressured, to privatise all public energy companies. It regulated the energy market in such a way as to guarantee the energy cartel oligopoly profits. And today, it does absolutely nothing to combat those opportunistic profits that profit from a war to multiply their bills and this is the same Commission that persecutes any state that pursues a ragtag public industrial policy, including those that aim to promote the energy transition that the European Commission talks so much about and does so little about.

Mr President, guaranteeing the right to mental health presupposes the regulation of business activity and the existence of public services to monitor working conditions and health, which have unfortunately been weakened all over Europe. But it also requires a return to a paradigm of protection of labour rights that prevents situations of precariousness, abuse, arbitrariness and violence in the workplace. And we don't all agree on this. The same right that advocated the deregulation of labour relations, the same right that advocated the deregulation of working hours, the same right that opposes, and continues to oppose, a directive on the right to disconnect, the same right that advocated austerity policies and the privatisation of public services, particularly public health services, is here today crying crocodile tears at the consequences of these policies on the mental health of so many workers in so many countries of Europe. We don't need crocodile tears.