Unaffiliated MEP Luis-Vicențiu Lazarus spoke during the debates on: Skills Union: let’s work to create more and better opportunities to study, train or work in the EU and to bring our talents back home, on Wednesday, March 12, 2025 – Strasbourg – during the European Parliament sitting in Strasbourg, saying: „I thought at the time that it was about bringing talent back to my country, but I saw that you have a motto here, which is called, if I understood it correctly, ‘Europe, choose Europe’.

Here is the full speech from the plenary of the EU Parliament:

Madam President, Commissioner Roxana Mînzatu, I was very happy to see that a Romanian, a compatriot of mine, is coming up with a program aimed at bringing back talent. I thought at the time that it was about bringing talent back to my country, but I saw that you have a motto here, which is called, if I understood correctly, ‘Europe, choose Europe’.

I would propose a motto: ‘let’s each choose our country’. Because, in 1998, when I was the leader of the Romanian student movement, I held a symposium with hundreds of students and I noticed that, by bringing in the president who had been president until 1996, Ion Iliescu, who was part of your party today, I noticed that our talents were leaving us, that our gray matter was leaving us. And that’s what happened. And in all these years we have lost millions of people to corruption, politicians and poverty. Maybe we should also think, as a colleague from Hungary said, about such a project for each individual country, because if each individual country is strong, Europe is strong.

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