Manfred Weber, on behalf of the PPE Group. – Madam President, dear Madam President von der Leyen, dear colleagues, first of all I think we have to recognise that we cannot welcome the President of the European Council today.

We speak about the outcome of an official European Council meeting last week in Brussels and the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, has obviously not the need to come to Strasbourg and explain to us as MEPs about the outcomes. So the Commission President is reporting, but not the Council President, so that’s why I would first of all generally underline that I see there a lack of respect towards this institution and I ask also our services to ask Charles Michel for clarification. What is the reasoning why he is not with us?

I want to thank Ursula von der Leyen, because in the last five years she was a representative of the Commission, always being present in all debates here in this House, thank you so much, Ursula, for doing so. That, dear colleagues, is the last speech before we go into campaign, before we try to convince Europeans for our parties, but also in general for Europe, and you can imagine that for me as the EPP Group’s leader, it is a great thing that we discuss now competitiveness, because the EPP has been asking for this debate for years now about jobs, jobs, jobs.

That was our EPP agenda over the last two or three years. Now it has arrived on the European level, on the European Council table. To be clear, competitiveness is not an empty word: it means preserving Europe’s more than 30 million jobs in manufacturing, creating new jobs like in the artificial intelligence field, it means empowering the 25 million SMEs in Europe to successfully lead Made in Europe into the future and it means also ensuring that 450 million European consumers receive good, safe and affordable products every day. When we speak about competitiveness, that is what we mean to underline the importance of this field.

From a political point of view, I have to say yes, that on the European level the Council understood it from a party point of view. Let me also say that in the PES electoral programme, Iratxe, you never mention competitiveness with one single word there, so you can really see also from a party political point of view who has an idea about what is needed and who has no idea about what is needed.

What do we have to do? We support the ideas presented by Ursula von der Leyen. The first thing is to strengthen our own market, the single market, the capital market union, services, energy. Also, the implementation of the current rules is an issue to strengthen our market, so we should not look to the outside world first of all, we should trust in our growth engine and that is our own single market.

The second thing is innovation: not to allow that Horizon Europe be further watered down and cut. We need more money for innovation. We have to cut bureaucracy. This mandate was not a good one in this regard: we increased bureaucracy, it was driven by the thinking that a regulatory framework is better than having trust in those who are delivering on economic success stories. We want and stand for a Europe that creates opportunities and not a regulatory framework first of all.

Finally, trade and not being naive in this world we are living in. When Olaf Scholz is in China and he is telling the Chinese that he has no problem with electric car production there, then for me that is quite naive, having in mind that 20 % of the cars sold in Europe last year are produced in China. They want to occupy this new market with their dumping approach. That is why we should be strong as Europeans, and we should be open for others for us to create a common market of the democracies in the world with Mercosur, with other agreements, this is the line to take.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, for us this is in front of us when we speak also for preparing the next mandate: at the end of this mandate, before we go to elections, I want to underline that we all share one common understanding: to save democracy in Europe, to fight against those who are taking Europe, who are taking the democratic principles. My party, the European People’s Party, is a founding party of Europe with Adenauer, De Gasperi, Schuman. Today, people like Donald Tusk have this flag in their hands. So we do this together with a pro-European, pro-rule of law and pro-Ukraine approach.

The campaign means to discuss things, but the starting point is that we delivered. We delivered together with Brexit, with the vaccines, with the RRF, with the Green Deal, migration and digital, the list is long. We did it together, and we did it together under the lead of Ursula von der Leyen as Commission President. So let us be proud about this and let us then have a good campaign where we show Europeans the alternatives in front of us.