The final report of the Conference is presented to the Presidents of Parliament, Council and Commission during a closing event on 9 May, Europe Day, in Strasbourg. Presidents Metsola, von der Leyen and Macron deliver speeches, alongside contributions from citizens on the National and European Panels and from the Conference Co-Chairs. Speech by Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic

VERHOFSTADT, Guy (Renew, BE)

ceremony

MACRON, Emmanuel (FR)

future of the European Union (T)

METSOLA, Roberta (EPP, MT, EP President)

ŠUICA, Dubravka (EPP, HR, EC)

French Presidency of the EU (T)

VON DER LEYEN, Ursula (DE, EC)

ZACARIAS, Ana Paula (PT)

Conference on the Future of Europe - Closing Event: Speech by Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, I have bad news for you. I'm going to give a speech, but I have good news for you. I'll try to repeat not what has already been well said. Before I took the floor, Madam President of the European Parliament, dear Roberta, Madam President of the European Commission, dear &Uacute;rsula, Prime Minister of Portugal, dear Antonio Costa, President, ladies and gentlemen, ministers, members of Parliament, my dear fellow citizens of Europe: "world peace can only be safeguarded through creative efforts that reflect the threats that threaten us". These were the words of Robert Schuman on the 9th of May 1950 on the contribution that vibrant Europe can provide to civilisation are more relevant than ever. These creative efforts correspond to the times we live in and today are more necessary than they were in the past. As you quite rightly said, war has come back to our continent at a time when people in Europe, the Ukrainian people are fighting for their freedom.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, now It's the time where you European citizens, members of parliaments, commissioners, European citizens, you have achieved an unparalleled exercise in democracy, unparalleled in our history and in the world. This vibrant, creative Europe, a Europe based on actions, Europe's representatives and its artisans here in Strasbourg, in this European capital so close to our hearts.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, The choice of the French people means that I can stand before you today to say that France will not step away from the task in front of us because France has resolutely chosen Europe by voting as it has to give me a new mandate to build up a stronger, more robust, more sovereign Europe.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, The Europe that we're celebrating today is one that we decided a year ago collectively to move into a new stage with President David Sassoly, who we're all thinking of today. You were quite right. All of you, in what you said. And it was under the Portuguese presidency, dear Antonio and I would like to also welcome the Portuguese prime minister, who's attending this today, showing continuity and the importance of this whole exercise launched a year ago in a different context in Strasbourg, the capital of European fraternity in the Parliament, which pays homage to our most precious value, which is democracy.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, It's a new stage, an unprecedented democratic exercise in the Union where we're not bringing Europeans together in a spirit of confrontation, to try and find simplistic options, but to think together about what the future of Europe could be, which is what you have done and it's unprecedented. You've been fully involved at a time of historic challenge in creating highly intelligent debate, looking for solutions.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, Some people want solutions to be applied immediately, others feel this will take time. But all of them will feed into the Europe we're building today and for the future. On the ninth of May, freedom and hope in the future have the face of the European Union. It's on behalf of this freedom, on behalf of this hope that we support and will continue to support Ukraine, its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and all of the people of Ukraine.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, What is our goal? Faced with the unilateral decision of Russia to invade Ukraine and aggress its people? To ensure this war concludes as soon as possible, to do everything to ensure that Ukraine will survive, Russia will never win, preserve peace on the rest of the continent of Europe and avoid any escalation. For this war to come to an end, we've adopted unprecedented sanctions to make it difficult to finance the war in Russia. To support Ukraine, we've mobilised military, financial, humanitarian resources like never before.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, And we need to step these efforts up to ensure we have an effective response when it comes to food security. And we will continue this so that justice can speak. We will fight against the fighting and the impunity for the crimes that have been committed in Ukraine. We are not, though, at war with Russia. We are fighting in Europe to maintain the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine for the return of peace to our continent. And it's up to Ukraine only to decide on negotiating conditions with Russia. Our duty, though, is to be by Ukraine's side to obtain a ceasefire and then peace, and then we will be there when it comes to rebuilding Ukraine as a part of Europe, always.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, Because when peace returns to European soil, we will have to build new security balances and together we must never give in to the temptation of the humiliation or a desire for revenge, because we know how much that has ravaged the road to peace in the past. So in the name of this freedom, of this hope, that we have addressed this task, this unparalleled new breath of democracy that you have undertaken and you've all said it in your own words, you've all contributed to this work, which is now an obligation for us.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, As you say, what we have today is not the end. It's a kind of a semicolon. It is a pause in this process, which we will take forward. The president of the European Commission has promised to attentively study each and every one of your proposals. And I would like to thank her for that. And we have another meeting together in September, as you have heard. On behalf of the presidency of the Council of the European Union and as representative of the French presidency, I promise that this will not be a mere formality. This will be a process which I am sure will lead to practical and strong concrete proposals that will benefit the people of Europe, because this conference must not stop here.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, I am convinced, and this conviction is reinforced by all the surrounding circumstances, that crises should not turn us away from our agenda. Many of your proposals can be adopted without institutional reform, but they remind us of the importance of our agenda to protect its climate biodiversity, health, the quality of our food, a fairer, more inclusive, Europe, a Europe of equality between men and women, a Europe able to defend itself, a Europe of solidarity that defends its values everywhere. Many very concrete proposals have been made by you, and we wish to ensure that we draw all the necessary conclusions from this in our future meetings with the Council and I commit myself to that.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, There are also two demands which I want to stress in particular. One is for the independence and effectiveness of Europe, without which democracy cannot be legitimate. And so these imperatives are the lessons that we draw collectively from the crises that we have just been through, that we are still going through independence and effectiveness, more European independence and sovereignty. This is what we need.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, In all of the crises that we have been through, Europe has been putting itself together and we are reminded by your proposals of the agenda set out by our European leaders of strategic independence, the Versaille agenda: the financial crisis that we went through 10 years ago, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, show our weaknesses and our vulnerabilities to the lack of ability to respond quickly enough.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, So a Europe that is mistress of its own destiny, free in its choices, open to the world, we want to be a partner, but not to be dependent. So we need to remain open without being dependent on others. That is a condition for continuing our European project and our democracies.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, You have outlined some of the avenues for us to follow, the areas in which we are going to have to work over the next weeks and months. When it comes to defence, to invest more, the need to identify the capabilities that we need to develop the industrial sectors that we need to prepare for potential future areas of conflict at sea, in the air, in space.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, To protect those countries on the border of the European Union who are faced with a new challenge, with a new threat, which has transformed us over the last few weeks. This is our duty and all we are saying today will become a dead letter if in the next weeks and months we are not able to render our capacity credible, our ability to defend ourselves, in particular on our eastern flank.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, And when it comes to the environment, you've rightly said we have to move out of fossil fuels and in fact, the war it requires of us as well. This actually feeds our climate agenda, the need to be independent and to make Russia face its responsibilities. The war in Ukraine and the desire to get out of our dependency on Russian fossil fuel means we need to move further and faster on climate change, we need to invest in nuclear energy, renewable energies. We need to be energy efficient, sober in our use, and help European citizens face the hike in prices.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, We need to become an environmental power with our goal of achieving carbon neutrality and also, we have to regain our food sovereignty. We are destabilised by the war in Ukraine. The food supply chains are disrupted. So we have to ensure that we have the capacity to produce enough food to defend our own food security and food sovereignty. But we also need to define and re-evaluate our strategy vis a vis the rest of the world if we want to avoid famine and geopolitical instability on our borders and tragedy throughout the Mediterranean basin, that is our duty as Europeans.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, And also, democratic independence and information independence. This is something that you stress rightly in the proposals that you have put forward. You have begun to show us what we really are, which is a citizens' and democratic power. And this is something that makes us unique in the world. This citizens' power is something we have to keep alive, defending the freedom and integrity of the information that is exchanged in our territories, on our soil, defending the integrity of our democratic processes and defending throughout European territory democracy and the rule of law. This is what, we realise all the more from the heroic combat of our Ukrainian friends, how precarious democracy is and freedom is. So we have to rebuild these through new commitments. Our independence and sovereignty, the preconditions of our freedom.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, And the next main point I want to stress is the need for effectiveness, the ability to respond to crises with strength and speed, and do this decisively as democracies. Remember just a year ago, remember what we were hearing? We had some people saying that it might be better if we were an authoritarian power in order to respond to the pandemic that the Chinese and the Russians were going to be quicker to impose vaccination.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, But what do we see? Open societies, democratic, transparent, processes in our national parliaments and in the European Parliament. That Europe in that context was able to become a health power without treaties, without text guiding the way. We were able to build a response. A unique novel response in the face of the pandemic, binding together science, democracy and effectiveness, managing to produce a vaccine on our soil, becoming the biggest vaccine manufacturing part of the world, while keeping our borders open, exporting and showing vaccine solidarity. That's what Europe is. And that is the Europe that we should be proud of. A Europe of democracy, of open and free science and of effectiveness. These things go together.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, So this is the choice that we have to continue. And if I look back over the last 15 years, faced with the economic and financial crisis, we were too slow to respond. Portugal and many others, and Greece, suffered the consequences. We were divided. We relapsed in national responses. We didn't come up with a collective response and we weren't working together to cope with this crisis that we had imported from across the Atlantic.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, But the response of the European Central Bank with the famous saying "whatever it takes". Those words pronounced by Mario Draghi, "whatever it takes". And in the face of the pandemic and now in the face of war, we have shown that we can be different.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, Confronted with a pandemic, with a unique decision in June 2020 to create a new budget, borrowing a response, a novel response for Europe, borrowing money on the financial markets in order to invest in our European priorities and in the face of war. For the first time, we decided to mobilise the European Peace Facility to help Ukraine defend itself and to fight in a way that we have never done before. So let us be proud of these choices that we have taken to be effective, without which we wouldn't be here today discussing this together.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, Yes, a round of applause for Europe. So the challenge EU faces with, is to be just as effective in times of peace and without a crisis to go to. So we have to decide quickly together, investing massively in the right things, not leaving anyone behind. That is what it is to be European. So faced with this, we also have to reform our texts. That is clear.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, And I'm forced to say today that one of the avenues for this reform would be to convene a convention to revise the treaties. That is a proposal by the European Parliament, and I approve this. I'm in favour of this. It would mean that we would have to work hard on the basis of all your work and all your proposals to define clearly what our objectives are, because you have to start a convention, a constitutional convention to know where you're going.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, So you you've given us a very strong remit, a strong framework. So in the coming weeks, we can prepare the ground, seek agreement on all sides. I am in favour of this institutional reform, and I would like us to be able to discuss this with the necessary courage at the next European Council.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, This will mean making progress to make things simpler. So moving forward, making more use of qualified majority voting for our main public policies. We should also continue to make progress and to define ways of showing more solidarity, clarifying our aims and objectives and the objectives of all our institutions, setting objectives that will help us to keep Europe together: growth, full employment, our climate objectives where our rules were designed decades ago and were based on objectives which now need to be supplemented in the face of the historic challenges that we face now. Full employment growth, carbon neutrality, social justice. These objectives must be at the heart of the aims of our institutions.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, Finally, opening up for these reforms also means providing legitimacy to democratic control, deepening this unprecedented democratic adventure and continuing these democratic innovations as we have done through your work. And I'd like to thank the president for having already taken a clear commitment to that just a few moments ago. But we know we need to go further.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, Our election rules are rules to appoint our representatives, our monitoring rules, our rights of initiative, the right of initiative for the European Parliament. All of that should be at the heart of this future convention.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, I firmly believe that we can undertake this work and I think we can be effective. I think that sticking to these environmental, economic and other goals mean that we will be effective and this will be a way of keeping our Europe together, because without these objectives, we will no longer be able to persuade our citizens that the European Union protects them and enables us to move forward.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, Now, obviously, not everyone will necessarily agree, but we shouldn't worry about differences. These have always been fertile for the European Union and they have never been excluded. They're part of what we do and they exist (the euro, Schengen, etc). But I've been struck during recent years as to how the will to stick together as a union of 27 means that we move forward and stick together. We, the heads of state and government, for example, never managed to meet as the Euro Group.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, We are the only co-owners who can't meet as co-owners of a building. We have to invite the whole street. We're worried about being more ambitious. And it's always the same thing from the euro to Schengen. And we're wrong on that because this grouping doesn't exclude anyone. But what it does is enables those who want to move faster to bring the others with them in their slipstream, rather than making things more risky and holding back.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, I know that there are concerns when it comes to differing speeds, but they already exist. We need to converge. We shouldn't be excluding, but we also shouldn't let the sceptics and those who are most hesitant hold us back. We need to ensure that Europe can affirm itself as a power. And this differentiation open to all of us, which is faithful to our history and the ambitions launched by our founding fathers, by the law for our Europe, are important. And this is a condition for us to be ambitious and effective.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, To conclude, let me go back to the context. I know that my proposals wouldn't be complete if I didn't respond to this point that emerged from your proposals. Now the war in Ukraine and the legitimate aspirations of Ukraine, like those of Georgia and Moldova, who want to also want to join the European Union, mean that we have to rethink our geography and the organisation of our continent.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, And here with the same sincerity that you've conducted your work, I want to say that Ukraine, because of its struggle and because of its courage, is already a member of Europe, of our family, of our Union.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, But even if we were to give it the status of candidate country tomorrow, I hope we move forward towards accession rapidly. But even if we were to do that, we all know only too well that the process for accession would take several years. In truth, it would probably take several decades. And that is the truth. Unless we decide to lower the standards for accession and rethink the unity of our Europe and also, partially, the principles that we hold.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, Let's be clear here. The European Union, given its level of integration and ambition, cannot in the short term be the only way in which the European continent can be structured. There are several countries, for example, in the Western Balkans who are engaged in the accession process and that needs to continue.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, Their vocation is clear, but we obviously also need, given the new geopolitical context, to find a way to see Europe to ensure that its unified and stable without making the intimacy within the European Union more fragile. We have a historic duty here not to do things the way that we've always done and to say the only response is accession. What we need to do is open up a historic process of reflection, given the events that are currently taking place on the construction of our continent.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, Our family is one of common values. It's been abandoned by Russia. We are being shaken by the tides of history. In 1989, President Francois Mitterrand said when the Soviet Union was falling apart that he wanted to see a confederation of European states. This was perhaps too precocious an idea. It included Russia in this confederation, which rapidly was seen as unacceptable for states who had just escaped the Soviet yoke. But it raised an interesting question, which remains: how should we organise Europe in a political manner and how can we go further than the European Union?

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, It's our historic obligation now to respond to that question. I think I would here today qualify what I'm talking about as a European political community. This new European organisation would enable democratic European nations who adhere to our values to find a new space for political cooperation, for security, for energy cooperation, transport cooperation. To invest in infrastructure where people could circulate, particularly young people. Joining wouldn't mean that you couldn't in the future join the European Union. And it also wouldn't be limited to those who have left the European Union.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, Let's bring Europe together on the basis of its geography, on the basis of democratic values, with a desire to preserve the unity of our continent. And we want to also preserve the strength and ambition of our integration. So this is a proposal to respond to your proposals? It's a proposal I wanted to make to you today. Now, during the coming weeks and months, I will consult and work with all states and governments who are interested in this project to try and fulfil it, because I think this is important for the future and stability of our continent.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, Ladies and gentlemen, a year ago I said that my hope was that this conference would see the return of great dreams and great ambitions. And you also wanted that to happen. That's what you've achieved. So together, that's what we're going to do. That is Europe. Europe is crazy dreams, unprecedented ambition, and then the collective ability to build compromises which sometimes seem laborious and which are the language of Europe. Constant translation.

SOUNDBITE (French), Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic, We need to act in a strong manner, move fast and dream big. These words don't only belong to the United States or China. Let's make these words our own. Let's maintain the spirit that wouldn't exist without the unique nature of Europe. Our Europe is a unique continent. Major celebrations are carried out by everyone speaking their own language and having what they say interpreted. And we also have our own universe, which is music, European anthems. So this path, which we started here in Strasbourg, I think traces a Strasbourg desire for a united, democratic and ambitious Europe. We need to be faithful to that idea. All of us together. You can count on me.