David SASSOLI, EP President delivers a speech by visio conference at the High Level Interdisciplinary Conference on the Future of Europe, Bruges, College of Europe. This transcription speech is the result of an automatic process. Check against delivery.

Brussels

statement

speech

future of the European Union (T)

SASSOLI, David Maria (S&D, IT, S&D, IT)

High Level Interdisciplinary Conference on the Future of Europe, Bruges, College of Europe: speech by David SASSOLI, EP President

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, Thanks to Federica, a greeting to all students and young people. Thank you for this invitation I am glad to intervene and to be able to share some thoughts with you at a particularly difficult time in the lives of our countries of our citizens.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, We had a particularly busy year because none of us would ever have imagined that the planet could stop. Not only have our countries, our cities stopped, but the whole planet has stopped. And this resulted in some very challenging choices. Especially the definition of certain strategies by the European Union to be able to bear the burden of the pandemic and the crisis that the pandemic has triggered.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, We are still inside the pandemic, we didn't get out of it. We are still seeing a strong spread of the virus. We have prepared some measures such as vaccinations, such as the preparation of plans to support the struggling economy, but we must realize that we are still in the crisis.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, And this crisis and the effects of this crisis will not last for a short time. We will bring them to us they will be very heavy. We see our economies suffer particularly and bring up a social issue of primary magnitude. We, at this time, are engaged on two fronts. The first is naturally the pandemic. The answer to this very serious crisis is at the same time to ensure that the response to the crisis does not slow down our identity.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, We said this at the beginning of the crisis and all the European institutions said this, even speaking with one voice, which is not frequent in the European political debate, that we wanted to deal with this crisis with democracy, with our values, with the sense of coherence and transparency that make the European Union at this moment a fairly unique case in the world.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, You have seen or read in the papers you will have confronted yourself that We have many tendencies that think authoritarianism is more efficient than democracy. So many debates that have also developed on the pandemic, the crisis that the pandemic has triggered have gone in this direction is democracy more efficient or authoritarianism is more efficient. This is a very important theme for us. Why? Because if we loosen our grip on our values well we would lack our identity. And this of European identity at the moment is a particularly important issue.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, The global effects also, which the pandemic has triggered, show us that not only can democracy be more efficient, because crises have to be faced with transparency, but at the same time, because around for the world, a model that holds together fundamental values such as that of defence, freedoms, defense of the dignity of the person, of fundamental rights... and a model that we do not often find and of which Europe can also be a reference point for others.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, We have a strong responsibility to combine the response to the crisis and the tightness of our democratic model. The crisis has brought up so many problems for us. We understood that we need to renew ourselves. Democracy is a fragile system that must be carefully guarded.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, We started this year all. You, too, with your nose upside watching in the news what was happening at the Capitol in the United States. We all had our gaze turned to the events in Washington. And what we understand, that we must have strong antibodies to defend our institutions and protect our freedoms.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, We have seen with pleasure of course that the United States has sufficient system and antibodies to repel those attempts but at the same time we realized that that bell can ring for us too. This brings us back to the reflection that a year ago we began to do between the Commission Parliament and the Council. This crisis we want to deal with it by strengthening our democracy.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, We have been particularly lucky, not everyone perhaps notices, even in the public debate in our countries. We were a little lucky to arrive at the crisis last March with a reading of the contemporaneity that gave us firm points. Because we were coming out of the proposal that the Commission had tabled in Parliament, and Parliament had accepted and improved on the European Green Deal.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, This is the reading of the Temporarity that Europe proposes: SAVING THE PLANET, allowing women and men to live better on our planet, is not only an ecological problem is also an ecological problem big economic and social issue. With that reading and with that proposal we arrived at Covid and we were lucky enough to have that tool to start working on tools that would converge the goals of all.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, Today we have put in the field of instruments that allow everyone to converge their efforts to do what to help our economies recover but also for Europe to become stronger. What does stronger mean? We with the Covid saw the many gaps with from the effects of choices of previous periods. Europe is more fragile than before, because it is less resilient.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, This is an important theme right now, which we hear a lot. You will have seen it even in the simplest things. How many productions did we realize last March that we left the European area? How many low-cost productions, for example, had we delegated to developing countries or transferred to other parts of the world? Resilience is a premise for being capable of being independent.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, And we have to work very hard for our autonomy and independence. We have spent last year setting tools and we understood that we can have common crisis response policies, especially by converging common objectives.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, But we have to continue working on two floors. The response to the crisis is the strengthening of democracy. At the beginning of the legislature, about a year and a half ago, we indicated the need to refine our democratic system and to give away a major initiative such as that which Federica mentioned the conference on the future of Europe.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, To do what? First of all, to begin a true dialogue with civil society, with citizens, with national institutions of all 27 countries. If we are to find improvements we want to find them together, we want to find them in dialogue and confrontation. We don't want them to change from above. A more participatory Europe can start from this spirit. And the conference on the future of Europe can give very important indications to policy.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, Of course we are a little behind the road map and we are aware of it but then again this year we have passed with our heads and hearts engaged in the response to the Covid. Now we're ready. And I was pleased the other week to meet Portuguese Prime Minister Costa, who took over the rotating presidency of the European Union, and to hear from him too the need to start this as soon as possible process.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, What does it want to be. It wants to be a storm that allows our citizens and citizens to participate in a definition of what the Europe of the future must be, to concentrate and propose changes to our rules, to put civil society and the idea of taking center stage.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, We do not want Brussels and its institutions to be considered far from life. We must ensure that Brussels and its institutions are the terminal of a participation that we have seen shut down in recent years and which has also mortified the initiatives of the European Union. Here is a season of dialogue, confrontation and proposals with whom, we are convinced that if we can foster this dialogue and this confrontation we can do it all round, with many environments.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, I think of the networks of our universities and research centres, our citizens' associations, our non-governmental organizations, national parliaments, parties, trade unions... This is the development of a conference that wants to animate the debate around a common future. This, I think is very important, especially to give the sign of a Europe that wants to strengthen its identity and update its mechanisms.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, We saw at the beginning of the year as I said a great democracy also expose its fragile sides and I was very pleased that President Biden in his inaugural address used the same expressions that we use when we talk about democracy as a fragile system, because of course authoritarianism can be stronger. But democracy is a system that must be whose strength is updated with context.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, Think about this year, the life of our institutions, for example, the many rules we had to change in order not to close the European Parliament and keep it open. Keeping it open has meant not blocking the European response, the use of technology, the use of our regulations... I believe that if we want to make sure that a fragile system like democracy is still an adequate response, we need to change it. And, above all, we need to identify those changes that may be useful right now.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, I think there is so much work to be done that it is also a college as yours can be useful to all of us feel part of a common destiny. Let us feel committed to writing blank pages that we must write. We don't want them to be written by anyone else.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, I remember when our legislature began a year and a half ago, an important interview by President Putin with an American newspaper, in which he argued that democratic systems, by now it was clear that they were past, fashionable. No. We believe that they have not gone out of fashion, and that democracy can continue to guard our freedoms. Europe from this point of view is a very unique case.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, Maybe we lack some pride. This causes us to flaw. I believe that the conference on the future of Europe can raise the level of our pride and also put the focus of a project like the European one to which so many citizens look admiringly out of European space. How many would like to be similar to us? We do not want to impose anything on anyone that is clear, but we want to be proud of this path that in 70 years has allowed our countries to find peace. And that perhaps today it can enable Europe to become a real instrument of peace in the world.

SOUNDBITE (Italian) David SASSOLI, EP President, I believe that without wishing to impose anything on anyone to respond to the admiration of so many, compared to such a strenuous, so slow, but also so important European construction, it can be an example and can constitute for us also an engine to continue. We need more Europe and I think this is very clear from the such difficult year we have been through.