France is ready for a European revolution and it is Germany that is pulling the brakes. For a long time, it was the other way around. You don't have to agree with the details of every single one of Emmanuel Macron's suggestions, but he's right about the idea of a new foundation of Europe. Europe's Social Democrats have long demanded this. If we really want to, we can create a different, better Europe in the coming years.

Politics is a dynamic process. When I was a young man in the 1970s, Yasser Arafat had just perpetrated various terrorist attacks. Just a few years later, after I had entered European Parliament, the same Yasser Arafat was given the Nobel Peace Prize.

We Germans are particularly aware that you can only be successful on the global market over the long term if you offer energy-efficient products that are, by nature, climate-friendly.

Keeping quiet and letting the others do the talking. That may be Angela Merkel's method, but it's not mine.

We're at a historical juncture: A growing number of people are declaring what has been achieved over the past decades in Europe to be wrong. They want to return to the nation-state. Sometimes there is even a blood and soil rhetoric that for me is starkly reminiscent of the interwar years of the past century, whose demons we are still all too familiar with.

The share of wealth held by the minority is much greater than the share held by the majority. We have to draw our own conclusions from that and it has to change.

The construction of social housing and the attempt to support families seeking to buy their own homes are all projects from the 1960s and '70s. It all sounds old-fashioned, but it is actually completely modern.