H.E. Ms Deike Potzel:

That was so comprehensive that I will pick up on, perhaps, one or two things and keep it short. Mr. de Almeida e Sousa described the impact and lack of solidarity, as the Deputy described it, within the EU regarding the pandemic. It would be wonderful if we could change that narrative a little bit in the sense that we might be able to look at what has been achieved since. There is no doubt mistakes were made at the beginning and that we could have done better. On the other hand, this thing came of the blue and we did not have a blueprint in the drawers of how to go about it. Since health policy is still a national competency, everybody was focusing on an immediate response. As Mr. de Almeida e Sousa said and as everybody agrees, mistakes were made in that process.

We can, however, be proud of the solidarity that has been shown within the EU. I think of the hundreds of thousands of stranded tourists we brought back together. Everybody helped one another. German and Portuguese tourists were on Irish planes and vice versa. We brought back Irish and Portuguese people as well. That was helpful. I do not want to brag about what we did but I know what Germany did. It was appreciated that we took in patients from Italy and France when their ICUs were overloaded. We will now hopefully get the multi-annual financial framework, MFF, and recovery fund going. We are taking that much money into our hands to help and deviate from or overcome the economic and social impacts of the pandemic. It is also worthwhile looking at the positives achieved in that process.

I wish also to say a few words on the concern about growing nationalism in the EU, which we all agree we need to look into. We are doing so and, as Mr. de Almeida e Sousa said, we need to talk with citizens in our societies about the importance of the values of the European Union which we all agree upon. We need to do that. I will allude to the fact we celebrated 30 years of German reunification on 3 October. I was born in East Germany and I know what it feels like not to have the freedoms we all enjoy in Europe, that is, the freedoms of expression, movement and assembly and the freedom to design and pursue one's life in a space of freedom and liberty.

We need to talk about this more in our societies. We must also keep reaching out to what are known as the "bubbles" on social media to try to break those bubbles and reach out to people who are not of the same view. We need to keep that dialogue going to make people aware of the wonderful treasure that we have in our open, liberal and democratic societies. That is extremely important. There are reasons or roots for nationalism which are very different in every country and it is important for countries to look at that themselves, I suppose. We do have ways and means, such as the Article 7 procedures against Hungary and Poland that are going on and will go on and, also, in the European context, to deal with certain aspects of the rule of law and to defend the rule of law in our member states.

On Palestine, we have and will continue to strongly advocate a two-state solution for Palestine and Israel. We are in very close contact with our Israeli friends, but also with our Palestinian friends. There is a huge amount of economic support for Palestine. We have a close relationship to both Israeli and Palestine and with reference to the annexation plans, we have been very clear and very outspoken to our Israeli friends that we feel that that is a step in the wrong direction and that we still advocate a two-state solution. We are very clear on that, including as a member of the EU. Our foreign minister had a very good exchange with the Israeli foreign minister at one of the last meetings of the Council. I cannot recall at which council but the latter attended for a lunch and the ministers had a very good exchange on all these matters.

On the eastern Mediterranean, we are very much in solidarity with our Cypriot friends and our Greek friends. We tried to reach out to Turkey and we will keep trying. We have said that back and forth from the Turkish side in terms of agreeing to talk and then sending in another ship is not helpful. We have said that is definitely not helping the dialogue. We will sit together in the EU. We have told our friends from Cyprus that we will sit together and figure out what other signals we can send to the Turkish Government to make it even more aware of where we stand on this. We will not give up on that - definitely not.