The College of Europe in Natolin welcomes Roberta METSOLA, President of the European Parliament. After a welcome address by Ewa OŚNIECKA-TAMECKA, Vice-Rector of the College of Europe, she delivers a keynote address to the Natolin students of the Madeleine Albright academic year 2023/2024. The address takes place in the Auditorium Copernicus in the presence of the representatives of the Polish authorities, of the College authorities, and diplomatic corps.

official visit

ceremony

METSOLA, Roberta (EPP, MT, EP President)

EU - Poland (T)

keynote speech

Poland

Warsaw

president's agenda

Keynote address by Roberta METSOLA, EP President to the Natolin students of the Madeleine Albright academic year 2023/2024

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, Thank you, Eva Grazia. Federica, director of the college of Europe, Students here, Europeans. Ladies and gentlemen, let me start by thanking you. You do not, you know, thank me. I thank you, first of all, for inviting me here, to address you here today and particularly for giving me the opportunity and privilege of giving the keynote address of this academic year. Madeleine Albright is a hero of mine, a woman who survived, who believed, who fought. And, you know, we have a lot to live up to.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, As my alma mater, the College of Europe, will always hold a very special place in my heart. The memories and connections that I made at the College of Europe in Bruges, as was the case for me, has been, and still are a pivotal part of both my political and personal life. And I'm sure that I will say that I hope the same will be for you, and I will deviate first, because then I have a formal speech.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, I'm going to say one thing. You know, as an anecdote, I was in the College of Europe exactly 20 years ago. So 2003, 2004, John Locke promotion, or as we called ourselves, the John Lockers as a very proud promotion, an extremely important one. It was the year that, people coming from my country, and the nine others, including this one, were joining the European Union.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, And I remember thinking to myself with most of my friends, actually, who were from those countries. Us telling each other where will we be once our countries join the European Union? And what will this college look like when that happens? And we would talk about this with, fellow students who will tell us we don't remember our country being outside the European Union. Since we were born, our country has been a member of the European Union.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, Today, 20 years later, I think you find yourself in that position. And I'm here maybe to rekindle a little bit of that hope and dream that we had. We had already done Erasmus. You know, the College of Europe was that thing that you had to do in order to be the best European student of European law and politics, economics, what we were doing. I left in the middle of my year, in 2004, to run for the European elections.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, So as I speak to students today in 2024, we're a few months, away from the next European elections. And, you know, those are that responsibility that we had. And I hope you have tools to carry forward a belief in Europe and politics as a force for good, because we are living in in troubled times, our hard won democratic principles are being threatened. War has returned to our continent. While there are those that question the European Union's very existence. But to me it's very clear. Europe's purpose is unchanged.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, From the ashes of war and lessons learned from atrocities which Poland's European capital city knows a lot about. The European Union stands for peace, it stands for prosperity, and it has been built on values of human dignity, on freedom and solidarity. And with Ukraine just 270km away from here, fighting for these values, we remember the spirit in which this College of Europe was built. It was built and established in 1992, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, when borders across the European continent opened and kinship rekindled.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, And this is a symbol of the, if you will, the unfinished adventure of European integration. Because with the opening of EU membership negotiations with Ukraine and with Moldova, and with the extension of the list of EU candidate member states, further EU enlargement lies ahead. So thank you for opening the satellite campus in Tirana. That's so important. And I have met so many people who come from Albania to me.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, Thank you for doing that. It matters to them that they can see the perspective that we saw before we joined the European Union. And if we see how this college continues under your leadership to attract students from all of Europe and beyond, in its Master of Arts in European interdisciplinary disciplinary studies, it's not only a place for students, it is also a place for, academics and professors that come together in a truly multicultural setting, an experience and perspective for their future.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, I couldn't help also thinking about this when I saw Alex to be elected president of Finland on Saturday. On Sunday evening, when I said she could give a little bit of credit to him standing up there for having been not only a College of Europe student, but also one of my professors in 2003.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, 'So why would colleges like this, you know, be so important in the way we do, and run our democratic life, or at least trying to achieve the best that a democracy, can offer, because those very values that I mentioned are very much. Rooted in having started here on Europe's eastern flank, and also the long-established mission at this college to prepare students to think beyond disciplinary boundaries, beyond preconceptions, to encourage us, as we were, to build bridges and embrace a wider perspective on Europe and the world.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, 'The mission began, in fact, three decades ago, with the ambition to overcome an unnatural post-communist East-West divide. My dissertation was a comparison of electoral systems of the former four Visegrad countries at the time. And, what I wanted to study is whether the way the four countries of Hungary, Slovakia and Czech Republic had identified different electoral systems in the new young democratic exercises and how that would shape the political scenery of those countries. And I think it would be, you know, worth also looking at in terms of when we bring interdisciplinary studies and I was a lawyer studying politics, as to how we can really look at electoral systems and democratic exercises as returning elected officials and representatives and the roles that they play.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, Now, with just 115 days before the European elections, taking part in that vote will be more important than ever. One would say this is obvious, but actually it's not. In each country that I visit, there are questions. In some countries, increasing questions. Also in these countries that are celebrating 20 years of membership as to what kind of reflection we should have about these 20 years of all the successes we have had, but also about convincing citizens in those countries to go out to vote for the elections. And my message is that the 720 elected MPs that will come to Brussels after the European elections will shape policies and adopt legislation that will affect nearly a half a billion citizens of the European Union. I would take this for granted.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, 'We forget that there are more people in this world who cannot choose their leaders than there are those who can, who can hold their representatives to account, to give them the responsibility, or at least to be able to give them the responsibility, but also take it away from them when they don't perform as you want or as you wish, or as you have promised or as they committed to. Yesterday I was in the Czech Republic, doing a similar trip as I did here, also with the students, and I thought of some of the inspirational words of former Czech president Václav Havel who once said: "We live in the post-modern world where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain". And his mantra is so fitting today that is one that we should follow. It is about being masters, ultimately, of our destiny, of the importance of taking charge, because nothing is impossible, particularly in these uncertain times.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, Now when we go back and say, what can we do? What can you do? I would like to think it is a bit more than just voting. I would like you to think about the possibility of placing yourself out for elections, being candidates, not being afraid to lose, not giving up and being also ambassadors of your country with the experience that you got here. And at the end of the day, in spite of all of its imperfections, the EU really still means opportunity in making people's lives a little bit better and a little bit fairer. What have we done over the past five years? The European Union has delivered in an unprecedented way. We have come together like I would never have thought.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, 'When I was elected president just over two years ago, I was asked, what will your mandate look like? And I remember thinking very clearly, you know, we are still and it was still at the height of the pandemic. We were slowly, slowly hoping to get out of it. And me thinking, okay, we are going to talk about a very difficult economic recovery post-pandemic. Who would have told me that less than a month later, we would have had a war on our borders, on our continent? But what we learned also in the past years is that we have done all of this in solidarity. We have procured vaccines for all European citizens. We have been firm in our support to Ukraine. We are bringing, as we said, our neighbours closer to us. We are bolstering our collective security.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, And when we talk about all of these successes and we should do it very openly, someone told me today, you know, we need to project hope, because we are fighting scaremongering campaigns, misinformation, propaganda, fake news. It is always much better to build a campaign on fear than on hope. It's always better or easier to destroy than to build. So in all my discussions, and when I make a point to mention Europe's successes, and we have had a few, as I've just mentioned, very big legislative packages that have been voted this week and last week actually, that people have been asking us, citizens have been asking for them for years. But I think we also need to be honest about where we can do better and whether we may have gone too far, too fast.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, And that we understand the real frustration with some of our processes. And the wrong thing to do would be to ignore those frustrations, to think that we know better, to just talk to ourselves in an echo chamber, rather than listening to real concerns of people who are not happy with what is happening, who don't feel included in the decisions that we make, who feel they can't afford the decisions that we take and how they are implemented. So the answer has to be dialogue, it has to be discussion, and it really has to be about convincing people to vote next June. And I will focus specifically on something that was brought up in each and every meeting that I had today with the agriculture sector.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, And the protests that are ongoing, across most European Union member states, where farmers are expressing their serious concerns and our answer as a parliament. We have been very clear on this that, first of all, we cannot address our climate challenges without our farmers and our agricultural sector, that when we talk about the green transition, part and parcel of that green transition has to be because we aim to be the most climate ambitious continent on this planet. And I will say we have no choice but to be that, because there is a real emergency that is sticking by that, and that transition will leave no one behind. And least of all, we do not leave the agricultural sector behind.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, And that is the Europe I would like to see. None of this, and I've just given a whole list and gone back and forth has been easy. If I think about how long it took us to arrive to a vote yesterday morning in the Justice and Home Affairs Committee on the Migration pact that we hope to conclude in March or in April, that we have defied the odds of adopting unprecedented numbers of sanctions packages, that we have stepped up and have shown unity more than ever. And I see this, it is not only, you know, a facade, actually, when I attended the European Council in my official position, it's really something that we can really say together that we have achieved a lot. It hasn't always been easy. We have had to do a lot of convincing to do.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President, But in the line of this promotion, I hope we have made, Madeleine proud. So I am convinced that, the future that lies ahead is with you in it, with your acumen, with your knowledge. Please use this experience, to select your career path. But never forget the experiences you had in order for you to take the next step. And it could be one step, two steps, three steps ahead. But always look back to what you learned here. And look left and right to your friends and neighbours in your dormitories. And never forget them. I never would, that's for sure. Thank you very much.