So I ask you to meet all these groups, meet young people – their ideas, their aspirations and their projects – and tell them about France and what makes it unique, attractive and innovative, and also to understand the underlying issues being played out in each of these countries. For two days, the Foreign Minister and the Economy and Finance Minister did some delicate work, following several weeks – several months – of initiatives aimed not solely at influencing the situation but creating the conditions for a de-escalation and a solution. But if we lose control of everything, this sovereignty leads nowhere. We are part of Europe; so is Russia. I do not think that this is in our best interest. I ask you to do all you can to obtain individual contributions to the replenishment of the Green Climate Fund. This is often said when talking about strong multilateralism. This is now beginning in the Gulf of Guinea and the Lake Chad region. So I need experts on some topics, in-depth connoisseurs, but also friends – because that is what I think is necessary – entrepreneurs and diplomatic innovators. Like you, I am struck by the fact that, from an organizational point of view, most of our budget, 95%, goes towards recurring expenses. I ask you to think about that. We will fight to keep jobs in our country by making dubious compromises with groups for which there is nothing more we can do. We are not an aligned power. This work must be continued and stepped up for the conference we will hold in Paris in July 2020, and Beijing in 2025 which will be an important date in terms of results on this issue. And when we reinvest in bilateral action, we sometimes find that we have disengaged in this relationship on a political, cultural and often educational level because French is becoming less popular in many of these countries, etc. We are in a Europe where we left the arms issue under the control of treaties that predated the end of the Cold War between the United States and Russia. France holds within it a piece of Africa, as it was African combatants who saved our country and our liberty. We should be concerned about our collective balance, and I am afraid I have already gone on for too long. Europe will continue to be the theatre of a strategic battle between the United States and Russia, with the consequences of the Cold War still visible on our soil. If not, the fate of the Western Balkans will be decided by the United States, Russia and Turkey. But it is most certainly not in ours. Because we cannot do that without reassessing in depth, in great depth, our relationship with Russia. And the second thing is that the world has started to become more savage, and here again the order on which our convictions and our systems were sometimes based is disappearing. The sovereignty not only of submarine cables but of 5G and other technologies will also be built through these geographical alliances, because a number of countries there fear just one thing: having submarine cables controlled by the Chinese, and solely Chinese technologies. I am not going to discuss Syria or Libya. It is one of the priorities of the French Development Agency, it is a priority of our work, it should also be a priority for our operational engagement, as I mentioned earlier on the subject of Africa. It rounds out European dialogue. At the G7 summit, we added a total of nearly €5 billion in financing to the Fund. The India that is emerging, these new economies that are also becoming not just economic but political powers and which consider themselves, as some have noted, genuine civilization states and which have not just disrupted our international order, assumed a key role in the economic order, but have also very forcefully reshaped the political order and the political thinking that goes with it, with a great deal more inspiration than we have. This is a crucial point. The Desert to Power Initiative by the African Development Bank and World Bank must be at the heart of the relationship which the French Development Agency has with these structures, and which naturally plays an essential role therein, and this is what we were able to launch and develop, e.g. But there are some obvious reasons for doing so. Why haven’t I decided to take initiatives? Basically, this project and the alliances we create presume an obligation in terms of human dignity. These states were spectators but are now starting to feel the effects of this conflict, which allows partnerships between African states on this subject and also allows involvement from the international community on this security issue to help each of them.But Africa represents much more for us, it is our essential ally so that Europe can continue to play its full role in global affairs, and in an address in Ouagadougou in November 2017, we laid the foundations of the new partnership which we will need to meet our major future challenges, and it is on this basis that we must continue. Emmanuel Macron, is to obtain an absolute majority in today’s legislative elections. I also think that, if we wish to be at the epicentre of efforts to rethink major global trends and act usefully, we must work with civil society, and this is where we need to keep innovating.This is why, last year, I created the first Paris Peace Forum. The first change is when we speak about the Arctic, Antarctic, oceans, Amazonian forest and African forest, which is burning too, while respecting the sovereignty of the states who have territorial jurisdiction over these regions, we are very clearly speaking about geographical common goods that are inextricably linked to our biodiversity and the climate issue. I was able to present the Amazon initiative yesterday with President Pinera.This initiative responds to the urgent needs by using our resources. To achieve this, we first need to focus our efforts back on the multilateral framework. And we have created conditions for our industrial and technological dependence regarding many issues. All that should raise far-reaching questions. Issues are becoming increasingly technical. We must also continue the momentum generated by these tangible coalitions. This was inspired by work in Parliament written by some of you present here in this room and created in very close collaboration with the Minister for National Education. It is essential that we re-establish this sovereignty if we are to continue to have genuine sovereignty in the future regarding these issues and continue to produce our power plants, our environmental climate services, our aircraft and defence technologies and all of our industry. However, I haven’t been exhaustive. But this temptation is still there. I firmly believe that this is needed for our diplomacy. I believe this military sovereignty is essential, including in the context of the tension over arms control I mentioned earlier.Sovereignty also means the sovereignty we must rethink on our borders. The new humanism I believe in, which we need to build and which must be central to the government’s strategy, must also be central to our diplomacy. These are everyday lives. And so we must include it in this consideration. This is because it gives us back room for manoeuvre. We must reinvest in dialogue with Baltic countries, Eastern countries, the Visegrád Group, countries in the Southern Mediterranean region. To give our people back some of the control they are owed, and to breathe new life into the European civilization project we have contributed, politically, strategically, culturally and in terms of imagination.Our diplomacy has a key role to play in this respect. As regards HFCs, which are far more polluting than CO2, we have also started an unprecedented strategy with industry stakeholders involving India. I think that this is crucial and I am asking you to re-engage extensively.I also think that we need to successfully reinvest in all the technical issues with a diplomatic angle, and I’ll come back to this point at the end of my speech. Meetings with artists, intellectuals and creators show the deep divisions in these countries, and help us to understand what politics or the aspects we perhaps focus on too much do not allow us to see. It is a strategy of boldness and vision, and it is about trying to rediscover something that profoundly characterizes the French spirit and, as I see it, to restore what is essentially European civilization. In particular, there were extraordinarily inspiring young people from Libya, Tunisia and Mauritania, proposing cooperation and ties which nobody had thought of and which are not seen in intergovernmental dialogue. It is our European project – which I deeply believe is also a French project – that must have the power to inspire our people. I have been saying this since the summer of 2017. stream We also have partners on one of the important challenges – and I will come back to this in a moment – namely the technological challenge.If we want to make a success of sovereignty in terms of technology and connectivity, we must take action on the Indo-Pacific axis. On our national holiday, we had the signatory countries around the table, in the stand in front of our fellow citizens and armed forces, and around the table here. Because there is a de facto extraterritoriality of the dollar. His promise of a constructive proactivism at the level of the European Union was enthusiastically welcomed in Europe. But the step taken in Biarritz was a historical one. Our partners reconsidered a number of their requirements. Obviously, I am aware of the scope of such a project. This is central to both our national and European agenda. But that also leads us to question the balance of our democracies. This is also why, with regard to the most sensitive political issues, and sometimes the most complex situations of democratic and political transition, I admit that we have adopted a strategy of peer pressure and not of direct expression or lecturing on what should be done.I have sometimes been criticized for my silence, but this silence has never been synonymous with inaction. It is all the people who come in via all our European neighbours, who have already started to seek asylum elsewhere and who come because we are quite a badly organized country in this respect, and we are not effective or humane enough on this. I say this because it is no longer obvious. Nevertheless, I wanted to honour a tradition and I questioned whether it would be better to stay at the G7, which has just finished; I told myself that the only risk I was running was falling short of the results achieved, of what we had collectively achieved, but I think that this shared moment ahead of the work you are going to carry out has a purpose.First, because this is the third time that we are meeting in this format and because it is very useful to follow up, and doing so after the G7 which France has just hosted makes even more sense. Because our companies, even when we decide to protect them and take them forward, are dependent on the dollar. If we wish to succeed in being a balancing power, rebuilding European sovereignty, obtaining results through a diplomacy of the global commons, and renewing the partnership with Africa and the Mediterranean, I believe that we also need to continue to overhaul our methods. So I strongly encourage you to embody this boldness and, to some extent, this wide-ranging freedom of action, in a very simple way.Firstly, I think it is essential to renew and enhance ties with civil society – as I know many of you are doing – in all of the areas in each of the countries where you represent France, and where bilateral relationships and our understanding of deeper issues are played out. For the first time, during the G7 summit we signed a charter for biodiversity. And I am also asking you to play an extremely active role on this. I believe that wherever we invest in education we cannot be satisfied with providing loans or buildings, we must also ensure that we are doing enough for high-quality education, and this will be part of our investment strategy. Nonsense, French folly, he’ll never achieve it. Because I strongly believe this is what should guide our action in France, in Europe and abroad.We experience this world all together and you know that better than I, but the international order is being disrupted in an unprecedented way, with massive upheaval, probably for the first time in our history, in almost all areas and on a historic scale. That is all right. And so against this backdrop, we will naturally continue to take strong action through Operation Barkhane, as always we will be operationally mobile, but it is essential that this be coupled with fresh commitment from our African partners, which we have sought through both the G5 Sahel and the Sahel Alliance, the military pillar and the development pillar, and through the increased commitment from the international community and neighbouring states, as we saw the day before yesterday with Chancellor Merkel and President Kaboré in this new Partnership for Security and Stability in the Sahel, which helps Gulf of Guinea states re-engage. We have now convinced many others and I believe that we are going to finish the job in the coming weeks. The end of the INF Treaty requires us to have this dialogue, because the missiles would return to our territory. But alongside that, we have reinvested in a strategy of educational partnerships, particularly in Africa, for the first time by opening up university degrees in countries which have been our allies for many decades and by allowing students to do courses in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, as strange as it may seem, and offering them in Tunisia and Algeria. We can deplore it, we can continue to jockey for position, but it is not in our best interest to do so. We then have a choice to make with respect to this major change, this major upheaval: do we decide to become junior allies of one party or the other, or a bit of one and a bit of the other, or do we decide to be part of the game and exert our influence? And the differences that took shape between us could have led to an escalation in the region, with terrible results. And that, I believe, is France’s strength. That is the situation. But I think that we need to reinvest in bilateral dialogue. Whatever the outcome of Brexit, it is essential that we continue to think about our sovereignty with Britain. As regards biodiversity, we know that we must take urgent action and much remains to be done. I truly believe that it is accelerating rapidly. There is obviously the defense of our short-term interests, the rules that must be complied with, the sovereignty and unity of Europe. I think that initiatives that come from the other side of the world are, generally speaking, not very successful. And these consequences are real geopolitical crises. It is true for the entire State. We must put these ties to use once again, in a new, balanced way. They decide. Others can have a non-multilateral, unilateral or bilateral strategy, we cannot. We did this with the support of our European partners, fully playing the role of a balancing power. putting France at the heart of the diplomatic game. Today, there are Chinese, Japanese and Turkish strategies in Africa, each with their own approaches, and of course an American strategy in Africa. What does Marine Le Pen do now? Let’s not be naive. Without this, we won’t be able to scale up the ecological transition. This is what we are pursuing through constant dialogue with President Putin, and we will set up this working group to move forward on this common architecture. I sincerely believe that ours must not be a strategy of market share and influence, of predatory hegemony, which is sometimes at the core of some of the projects which I have just mentioned. It is built through meticulous strategies of alliances with other African leaders so that action can be taken. That, I deeply believe, is what must motivate us. But it is essential to think about European sovereignty.Firstly on the issue of defence. Because when we speak of the Southern Mediterranean region and Africa, we are also speaking of France. A form of determinism. And what we need to build on is a strengthening, a greater integration of the Euro Area, a greater integration of financial markets of the Euro Area and stakeholders, and a capacity to build everything that truly establishes financial and monetary sovereignty.