 Dear colleagues, dear friends, I would like to begin by thanking my executive board colleagues for organizing once more a farewell conference for the departing ECB vice president. All great institutions maintain rituals of recognition that are predominantly directed to preserve a sense of community and collective work, as well as being opportunities to reflect on future endeavors. In this context, I am particularly immensely grateful to all speakers in this colloquium. Academics and economists that I respect and admire, with whom I have interacted on several occasions over my years as vice president of the ECB. My professional life is easy to sum up. I have worked 34 years in central banks. I have worked four years in a private bank. I have been in politics four years, in two different periods, two years as member of government, two years in pure politics, where I discovered that that was not really my vocation. And overlapping with this, I have been teaching 26 years at my faculty. I continue to teach even when I was governor of the central bank. So you can imagine that the imminent departure from the central bank community is a challenging milestone to master. Milan Condera, the great French Czech writer, has accurately described the only silver lining of aging and ending a career, seeing it as an enhancement of personal freedom and independence, which he put it this way, no more applause to conquer, no more audiences to seduce, no more ambitions to fulfill. While an insider in the ontological demanding institution, one can exert some influence and generate slight nudges of opinion, which may have some impact on events, however small. However, before the exit from his position, the insider pays a price for this role in terms of having to restrain his voice and respect his loyalty towards the institution to use the well-known Albert Ischmond metaphors. No one has expressed better than Kenneth Galbraith the risks of such a situation. The curse of the public man, I am quoting, is that if first accommodates his tongue and eventually his thoughts to his public position, presently saying nothing but saying it nicely becomes an habit. On the outside, one can at least have the pleasure of inflicting the truth. End of quote. So I have refrained until today to express my personal views on the reforms needed to deepen and strengthen the EMU. Close to departure, I feel that following some other colleagues, the time has come for me to talk about what I think is necessary in completing the Odyssean journey of the European Monetary Union, which is the title of my talk. In the ancient Greek epic, Odysseus faces a long and arduous journey home, facing storms and mythical monsters along the way. We are not home yet. And just as Odysseus was not satisfied during his seven years spent on Calypso's Highland, we should not be lulled into a false sense of security by the current economic upswing. It is true that with all member countries growing and after the great adjustment in the periphery to correct its imbalances, the Euro area is much better prepared to resist external shocks in the immediate future. Thinking, however, farther ahead, it is common knowledge that Europe and particularly the Euro area remains at the crossroads today. Aside from a single currency and a fiscal break, the initial EMU architecture was minimalist. The governance of economic and financial policies firmly remained a national competence and there was no fiscal policy at the European level, no crisis management mechanisms or financial assistance to states and no European financial supervision. In spite of the efforts of many economists, the design did not even reflect the theory of optimal currency areas. Rather, it promoted the view of a monetary union as a viable device of our money to create price stability from which efficient and smooth functioning of the economy would result. Monetary union was indeed conceived under the ages of noble goals and some naive illusions. In core countries, the nominal thinking was that after providing a single currency and a fiscal break, it would be up to individual member countries to adjust their behavior without the need for any additional collective concern or burden, something that was assured by the no bailout clause and the prohibition of monetary financing. Monetary union could almost be seen as a vast currency board device to extend the benefit of price stability to the whole Euro area. Financial imbalances originating from private sector misbehavior and excessive in-depthness were totally ignored. In turn, in weaker countries, the nominate view was that the drop of interest rates, the big shock and the disappearance of difficulties in finding foreign currency to pay for external deficits as were seen as an easy way to ensure growth and convergence without the need for fiscal prudence, responsible wage behavior, structural reforms, and real economy adjustment. In 2000, in my role as central bank governor, I alerted that the successful participation in the monetary union implied adjusting behavior to new rules to permanently maintain a counter-cyclical fiscal policy and sensible wage developments. I wrote then, in the past five years, unit labor costs in Portugal have always grown above rates in the remaining Euro area countries. This trend cannot continue indefinitely. Thus, the 3.7% increase in civil servant wages are a bad example. They were in the budget for that year. Hardly reconcilable with the situation of public finances and should not be followed by the remaining sectors of the economy. All the illusions in all countries nurtured by governments were, of course, shattered by the crisis. Inbalances accumulated in a roundup to the crisis with the assumed protective mechanisms failing. The stability pact was breached by France and Germany in 2003, 2004. And the restrictive role of real exchange rates appreciation was far too slow to operate. Financial markets showed yet again how badly they dealt with sovereign debt, almost equalizing the yield of all member state bonds. At the same time, huge capital inflows inundated the weaker countries. And the exposure of banks of core countries quintupled the exposure towards the periphery. Quintupled between 99 and 2007. Contrary to the main narrative popular in core European countries, the driver of these imbalances was not fiscal, with the exception of Greece. In 2007, the public debt to GDP ratios of Portugal, Spain, and Ireland were, respectively, 65%, 36%, and 25%. And as Paul and the Grover showed, the public sector debt of Italy, Spain, and Ireland had decreased from 99 to 07, whereas during that period, private sector debt exploded by 71% in Italy, 75% in Spain, 101% in Ireland. What had exploded since 99 was this private debt in all these countries, confirming the general finding of Jorda, Shullaric, and Taylor on the analysis of financial prices in advanced economies from 1870 to 2008. The authors conclude, and I quote, that private credit booms, not public borrowing or the level of public debt, tend to be the main precursors of financial instability in industrial countries. To offset or significantly mitigate the effects of this private sector expansion, budget circles who have to have been enormous and totally unfeasible, as I demonstrated in the text that Philip Lane quoted referring to my 2004 contribution to a conference at the ECB. The bitter discussion about how to interpret the crisis still lingers among member states and contributes to mistrust. For some, the design of monetary union was perfect, and the blame for the crisis lies with peripheral countries and their unsound fiscal policies and excessive sovereign debt. For others, it is mainly a story of insufficient stabilization mechanisms and a traditional balance of payments crisis in the fully fixed exchange rate regime with uncontrollable external capital inflows and the banking crisis. And I am in this second camp as my interventions, particularly in 2013, show. So additionally, the crisis also made clear that the design of monetary union had three crucial shortcomings. First, the absence of any mechanism to respond to acute liquidity squeezes and sudden stops in the sovereign bond market, linked with the demotion of national public debts to debt with default risk. Panicking in markets, fragmentation, and contagion without change in fundamentals threatened the collapse of the whole project. No one had thought about the possibility of capital flows sudden stops within the European Monetary Union. Second, the framework did not include a macro stabilization function to deal with asymmetric and symmetric significant recessionary shocks that may exacerbate fragmentation and create re-denomination risk. As it happened in the double deep of 2012-13, it is well documented that the second recession of 2012-13 in the Euro area was mostly the result of the simultaneous fiscal consolidation by member states. I have shown in my recent speech that it was not monetary policy or the very temporary increases in interest rates that we did in mid-2011 and then eliminated by the end of that same year. There is a working paper of the European Commission using their quest model showing that putting together at the same time this simultaneous fiscal consolidation, they found that for three years, 2011-2013, the impact of that implied a deviation from the baseline development of 80% for Germany, 18% for Greece, 15% for Portugal, and so on. And another academic paper using different models finds a loss deviation from baseline between 14% to 20% for the Euro area GDP during the same period. The absence of a coordinated fiscal policy from a Euro area wide perspective has been a core problem of monetary union. Third, economic and financial integration was not accompanied by any sort of European-level supervision of the financial system, particularly of banks. The huge capital inflows into the European banks periphery without due consideration to concentration and proper credit risk management were not countered by a potential supervision that was then fragmented across countries. Under pressure of events, some answers were found to these three types of problems from the creation of the European stability mechanism and the banking union, a project still far from finished. These responses illustrate that the monetary union can never be just a matter of demanding and assuming that individual member countries behave appropriately. The diversity of shocks, the level of financial integration, and interdependence requires collective mechanisms for discipline and risk sharing. The unavoidable political economy debate stems from this. As stronger countries are tempted to deny that overall stability demands some risk sharing and underline instead mechanisms of risk reduction, whereas vulnerable countries tend to resist acceptance of severe risk reduction measures if risk sharing is not sufficiently present. No surprise then that the discussion on continuing the repair of monetary union shortcomings has clustered around two approaches. One that I will call minimalist and concentrated on risk reduction in weaker countries and the other more comprehensive aiming at including also elements of risk sharing with a certain dose of fiscal union. In this last category, one could include the five presidents report, several documents by the European Commission, and the IMF. The attempt by 14 French and German economists recently in the CEPR policy insight to put forward a well-intentioned attempt of a compromise between the two views is much too tilted towards risk reduction to be acceptable as a possible solution, in my view. The minimalist approach has several variants, but in general it denies the need for a macro stabilization function. Discards a reasonable way of dealing with government debt liquidity crisis and rejects an early creation of an European deposit insurance scheme offering instead a long-term promise of a contingent implementation. On the other hand, it insists on strong instruments to force diversification of bank holdings of domestic sovereign debt and to facilitate a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism. When combined, these elements would create in my view immediate instability in sovereign bond markets and induce self-fulfilling crisis. I will address these problems with the minimalist view when describing my own views on which is a comprehensive approach to deepening and completing monetary union. I will not consider questions of political economy feasibility, but of course, my remarks reflect already some restraint and my experience of 18 years as member of the ECB governing council. In unfolding my views, thinking about the three shortcomings I highlighted before, I will focus on the following six points that I consider the more relevant ones to ensure a stable and effective monetary union, the settled solution to liquidity crisis in sovereign bond markets without a mechanism of debt restructuring, the completion of the banking union, the creation of an European safe asset, which is at the center of what I think, the serious launch of a capital markets union, which is not there, the creation of a central macro stabilization function, and finally, the revision of the stability pact. Not to weaken it, but to change it. In relation to issues with sovereign debt in a monetary union, Charles Goudard already warned us back in 1998 in his classic paper on two concepts of money and optimal currency areas. And I quote, the participating nation states in the monetary field will have changed to a subsidiary level in the sense that they can no longer call upon the monetary authority to create money to finance their domestic national debt. There is to be an unprecedented divorce between the main monetary and fiscal authorities. End of quote. The far-reaching consequences of this were not properly considered at the time. In 2012, talking about the gaps in the European Monetary Union, Chris Sims wrote in the same vein, and I quote, the combination of a treasury that issues field currency debt and a central bank that can conduct open market operations provides a uniquely powerful lender of last resort. The euro, as originally structured, seemed to require the elimination of national level lender of last resort functions for central banks without creating a strong replacement at the European level. He also warned that a narrow interpretation of the framework, and now I quote, would return Europe to something akin to the gold standard with no lender of last resort, no inflation cushion against extreme shocks, and an implicit euro area bankruptcy court exacting sacrifices from delinquent debtors. It's not clear that the member nations thought these was what they were signing up to. End of quote. Later, Paul de Grave, in his classic paper about the weakness of national debts, and Wilhelm Boiter talked about a fragile euro area and also called for the creation of a lender of last resort that could deal with sudden and extreme liquidity crisis in the markets of national sovereign bonds. In 2011, after the Deauville episode and the early talk about the Greek debt private sector involvement, financial markets attacked Italian and Spanish sovereign bonds without any change in their fundamentals, showing the outcome of a domino effect that threatened to ultimately reach some core countries as a result of widespread contagion, which I documented in a speech in 2011. The ECB is the central bank of all member countries and used the legal powers foreseen in its statutes to combat the financial fragmentation that was impairing the transmission of the single monetary policy to all parts of the euro area. This involved conducting open market operations, because that's what QE's are. They are just large scale open market operations, which are foreseen in our statutes in the treaty. To launch, first, the securities market program in 2010 and then 11, as well as announcing the outright monetary transactions in 2012. These initiatives put a stop to the sovereign debt liquidity crisis. At the same time, very sizable medium term facilities were made available to the banks to stabilize the system. All the bold decisions taken during the crisis would not have been possible without the courageous leadership of presidents Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Drague. And it was my privilege to work as vice president with both of them throughout this period. Those decisions saved the euro area and illustrate the importance of having leaders with their convictions at the helm of the ECB. We were acting within our treaty competences. And the programs we conducted, the SMP, the OMT, and the asset purchases program, are now part of the permanent ECB toolkit to be used if and when the situation so requires. Let me underline, it is also important to underline that our OMT program has attached conditionality and adjustment programs to be used. So it's to be used in very exceptional circumstances and it's not then a reflection of a general fiscal dominance. From now on, the ECB will have no excuse not to fulfill its mandate in addressing the impairment of the single monetary policy transmission by intervening in the sovereign bond market when extreme situations so justify. The only alternative that could ensure equivalent results would be the general use of euro bonds to substitute national sovereign debts, a solution that would require a treaty change and a very, very advanced stage of political union. And we are very, very far away from any of that. The agreed and settled framework of asset purchases programs stabilize the euro area and that would be disturbed by the introduction of a SDRM with thresholds and some degree of automatism or by simply strengthening the presumption of a debt restructuring whenever a country has to ask for an ESM program. Here I deviate from the general wisdom of mainstream economists that seem to believe that a SDRM would be possible and advantageous. Contagion and self-fulfilling crisis would return. In my view, the fact that the ESM legislation already now foresees that a country must ask that the ESM must ask the commission for a debt sustainability analysis before starting or approving a country program and that euro-country sovereign bonds are mandatory issued with collective action clauses should be enough to dispel the concerns of proponents of a SDRM. Nevertheless, the discussion has continued and recent proposals have multiplied. In the recent German-French CEPR paper, the authors recognized the sensitivity of the issue and right when introducing such a policy, it is essential to ensure that it does not give rise to the expectation that some of the present debt of high-debt countries will inevitably be restructured, triggering financial instability in debt markets, end of quote. However, as they recognize, there is no simple solution to this transition problem. Some of the same authors jointly with a few others in two CEPR previous papers in 2015 and 2016 had proposed to proceed the introduction of the SDRM by an operation of legacy debt reduction. They were also more concerned with the transition and wrote. And I quote, the SDRM would be dangerous as the transition path would be highly destabilizing. Imagine, for example, announcing the implementation of the debt restructuring mechanism in an environment where several countries are already highly indebted. The result could be a run on their debts. The way to deal with the transition path problem is a quipro quo. We propose a coordinated one-off solution to decrease the legacy debt in exchange for a permanent change in institutions. Well, the reality is that these type of approaches totally disappear meanwhile since 2016 and are not on any recent proposal. On the whole, some sort of SDRM is an idea that several member countries could hardly subscribe to and that, in general, would be quite destabilizing. It's conceivable that all member countries could embark into a sort of Faustian bargain and a Faustian trade-off, where they could trade off the introduction of such mechanism in exchange for the debt relief front-loaded. But I don't think that this is the realm of possibilities. So in general, the idea would be quite destabilizing, contributing to aggravate potential, red rumination risks that would be detrimental to banking union and capital markets union. As recently stated by Asharia and Stefan, and I quote, a functioning capital markets union needs a level playing field in the holding and transacting of debts and equity securities by market participants in different countries. That is, a CMU with fully integrated capital markets can only work when the status of sovereign bonds as a risk-free asset is restored. I do not think that it is necessary to equalize, as they mentioned, but the important aspect to stress is that we cannot have a CMU without the existence of an European risk-free rate and the absence of significant financial fragmentation and red rumination risk. In this way, only the idiosyncratic credit risk should matter for asset valuations in any region of the monetary union without having to consider the red rumination risk. Completing the banking union would seem to be the easier part to achieve. Launching the eddies with a firm unconditional timetable and deciding on the fiscal backstop, both for eddies and for the single resolution fund, as proposed by the ECB in its public opinions, would be the logical steps in a project that all countries claim to support. A large amount of risk reduction has already occurred in the past few years in the more vulnerable countries and their banking sectors. The truth is, nevertheless, that so far the banking union project has been exclusively about risk reduction and no specific element of risk sharing has been introduced. Perhaps there are concerns that eddies will imply significant transfers across countries in case of a new banking crisis. We published recently an ECB occasional paper simulating severe banking crisis, and we show that with proper risk-based banks' contributions to start with an almost negligible cross-border subsidization would occur. Another aspect of risk reduction refers to the holdings of domestic sovereign debt by banks. Indisputably, the credit risk situation of sovereigns affects banks via several channels, including the amount of debt they hold. However, the influence of sovereigns on national firms, both banks and non-banks, seems to be similar throughout the powerful effect that the sovereign in difficulties spreads to the whole economy. Over time, for European countries, CDS Premier of non-financial firms and banks are impacted in a very similar way throughout the crisis when the sovereign credit rating severely deteriorates. During the crisis, CDS Premier do not even show very clearly that banks with higher ratios of domestic public debt did significantly worse than others with lower ratios. It is difficult to presume that with some degree of diversification, the situation of banks can be significantly disconnected from the sovereign position. This macro channel dominates the impact and also plays an important role when credit rate agencies decide on bank ratings with or without support. Another significant aspect relates to the recent empirical findings of Giulio Craig and Paterlini. And I quote, using a sample of 106 European banks included in the EBA stress test that is set over the period June 2013 to December 2015, they find that the diversification requirements, such as the ones proposed, can actually increase the risk of the resultant portfolios in all countries, while having little effect on the tail risk or contagion risk, giving that the reduction of risk is a major reason for a costly diversification requirement results suggest caution before their adoption. Analyzing the tail risk of portfolios, the authors also conclude, and I quote, the rebalanced and current portfolio show similar levels of tail risk, both for single countries and for EU banking system, which means that rebalancing portfolios to increase diversification may be inefficient, even when correlations between sovereign defaults is higher during a crisis. A last aspect to underline is that no country can reduce the accumulated stock of debt in a few years and has to ensure its annual rollover needs, naturally having to rollover to heavily rely on the previous holders of the redeemed debt. Some countries have to rollover several hundred billion euros a year. The issue, therefore, is not just about new debt flows where things would be much easier to manage. Now, despite all of these considerations, I have supported and I support a change in the regulation to a positive risk weights for holdings of domestic debt in different forum. The weights, nevertheless, would start at low levels and would increase with the degree of concentration and would become really biting only in higher, much higher levels of concentration in domestic sovereign debt. Other proposals being floated around, either with quantitative limits or starting with high capital charges at low concentration levels, could disrupt debt markets in the short term without much gain in terms of risk control, as I underline just now. Even under the pressure of harsh regulation, diversification is not easily achieved on a voluntary basis by the banks. Banks in core countries, since the crisis, started to have, since the crisis started, have significantly reduced their exposures to banks in the periphery and would be reluctant to change their policy even as a consequence of higher costs to keep their portfolios of sovereign debt of their own countries. And to diversify towards now starting to buy more and more periphery is perhaps a challenge. Finally, imposing high costs just for the euro area banks would be contrary to maintaining an international level playing field as other jurisdictions could not agree to any change in the present regulation. These points illustrate well that the proposals to introduce a stringent regulation to impose a quick change in bank holdings of domestic public debt go beyond concerns with credit risk management. It relates instead to the objective of making a SDRM possible, which would be difficult to activate, of course, if it entailed large losses by banks with portfolios on the restructured debt. The only good solution to achieve a degree of diversification and then step up regulation about the issue would be the introduction of a new European safe asset built on the basis of national sovereign bonds. This asset would have other even more important roles to play by creating a benchmark rate, thereby making possible a capital markets union with a sizable and deep European bond market. I'm not referring to the type of euro bonds that would substitute national sovereign debts as I already mentioned, but among the various possible proposals put forward, I will comment just on two of them, a variant of the ESBs or SBBSs, and the e-bonds as proposed in the Monte report. The current proposal of the SBBSs refers to a trunched synthetic bond backed by national sovereign bonds and using three tranches. Market players and rating agencies have been very skeptical of the instrument. Their main concern is the perceived risk of diversification to ensure that the senior tranche can be indeed as saved as claimed because correlations among several country debts could increase in the stressful situation. But the important point is the economics of the product. It may be difficult to sell the junior tranche at coupon levels that do not compromise fatally the overall economics of the product. Indeed, if the junior tranche had to be placed at a relatively high coupon, then the senior tranche would need to offer a much lower coupon than bonds, a doubtful selling prospect. This would render the economics of the SBBSs invaluable, which would be very unfortunate. I would love to be wrong and that markets would pick up on the thing as proposed. But these obstacles could be overcome. If, for instance, a small first loss tranche were to be covered by a public guarantee jointly provided by member states, such contingent liability could be limited to a reasonable level. And the success of the synthetic European bonds would have significant benefits for financial integration and for the banking and capital market union. The alternative of e-bonds issued by an European entity as a pure securitization of sizable amounts of national sovereign debt, but with higher privileged credit status over them would be less efficient and could increase the cost of issuing the non-preferential part of pure national debt. An integrated European bond market as a central piece of a capital markets union cannot ultimately exist without an European safe asset. A single term structure of risk free interest rates could serve as a Euro area pricing benchmark for the valuation of bonds, equities, and other assets. The safe asset could also be used as collateral, for example, for repo and derivative transactions across the Euro area. An advantage of a CMU is of course the promotion of private income and consumption smoothing across the whole area, thus mitigating the effects of localized recessionary episodes. But perhaps even more important, the CMU project is highly relevant for economic growth. A deep and liquid market, both of debt and equity, would spur innovation and enable the development of an efficient venture capital market. That would be very important for the recovery of productivity growth. As I said in the recent speech, though, we should however be well aware that CMU requires an European safe asset, the harmonization, a degree of harmonization of taxes on financial products, a conversions of company law, including on bankruptcy, the creation of a single rulebook for regulation for markets, activity, and ultimately an European single securities market in the long term. And the other big condition is a rock solid monetary union so that asset risks and returns are not significantly influenced by re-denomination risk, but exclusively by their idiosyncratic features. I have it all, I know. But I will believe that the CMU project is possible and really willing when I see authorities making inroads in some of these difficult issues. A central fiscal capacity for the Euro area has been identified as a necessary reform to correct a basic deficiency of EMU. A necessary central fiscal capacity has two elements. An effective institutional mechanism to ensure coordination of national fiscal policies in order to discuss and decide an adequate Euro area fiscal policy stance. Second, a complementary central stabilization fund that can take several different forms. I can be very brief on this latest, this last element because I basically agree with the recent IMF proposals for a rainy days fund. Alternatives in the form of a common unemployment reinsurance scheme or an investment protection scheme are not so convincing to me. The European stabilization fund transfers should not be permanently benefit the same countries and to avoid moral hazard, the use of this stabilization fund should be conditional on past compliance by countries with the existing fiscal rules. The design of the fund should also include sufficient features to avoid these incentives in the implementation of structural reforms. By triggering transfers should be automatically dependent on a threshold indicator based on the unemployment rate. By collecting net contributions from the countries in good times, the scheme would also create incentives for a true counter cyclical fiscal policy. And the mechanism should be used both for asymmetric and symmetric significant shocks to face things like the double dip that we had in 2012. And to be effective in this direction, this fund should must have borrowing capacity to temporarily overcome a potential lack of accumulated revenues. The creation of this central fiscal capacity would be the recognition that the efficient functioning of the monetary union is a common responsibility, while at the same time smoothing out significant economic downturns that can originate dangerous economic and financial fragmentation among member states. Let me conclude. The European monetary union was a hubristic endeavor from the start, full of unprecedented ambition in historical terms. The initial minimalist design did not do justice to the wide-ranging implications of the project. The framework is not yet complete and is still risking existential threats. A solid effective monetary union requires, as I just highlighted, national and European institutions that can ensure a cohesive economic and financial performance does avoiding excessive imbalances, financial fragmentation and significant persistence of re-denomination risk for member states. And in turn, these features imply the list of priorities that I have just highlighted. Ensuring the conditions for a successful monetary union is an individual and collective responsibility of all member states. To date, some have benefited more than others from the project, but its collapse would indisputably greatly harm all countries. As Barry Eichengreen once wrote, the collapse of the Euro area would be the mother of all financial crises. The vested interests of all countries should be to create the institutional conditions that would avoid existential crises like the ones we went through since 2010. Letting new crises develop and then implementing last-minute interventions and the duress will always be more expensive. Contrary to the views of skeptics, the Euro area has undergone a substantial part of this journey since 2010. The remaining efforts are both necessary and technically not difficult to implement. As I said initially in presenting my views, I did not consider issues of political economy feasibility. However, this does not mean that I adopted a maximalist view of desirable reforms. Note, for instance, that I did not mention in my list the necessity of a full-fledged fiscal union with permanent fiscal transfers, policies to ensure a closer conversion in real income across member countries, or institutional governance reforms involving the Eurogroup or the European Parliament. This implies that my proposals are not just the musings of the looted technocrat aiming for perfection. I take into account the social-political consequences of the way Europe addressed the crisis, as well as the other causes that have resulted in the growing trends towards authoritarian nationalism, illiberal democracies, and populist demagoguery that endanger our European values. I also know that responsible politicians are well aware of these dangers and that they cannot be defeated by adopting pure national interest strategies. I also understand how difficult it is, and that is why President Macron is talking about the need for political heroism. In calling, and I quote, for a recreation of a sovereign, united, and democratic Europe. Only Europe can, in a word, guarantee genuine sovereignty or our ability to exist in today's world to defend our values and interests, end of quote. Indeed, these are not technocratic goals, but vital political necessities for an European Union that should protect our citizens in terms of safety and prosperity. Our nations tied themselves to the Odessian must of monetary union, and endured mighty storms to survive and pursue the journey towards a peaceful and prosperous destination. We must persevere in our aims. We must complete what is missing. We must achieve what is essential. Our penipally is still waiting. Thank you. Thank you.