Quote of the week by S&D Group president Iratxe García, on the new Migration and Asylum Package:
“Finally, after more than a decade of tough negotiations, and thanks to the unity of the S&D Group, we finally put a real European solution in place. This moves us away from ad-hoc crises responses to a permanent and sustainable procedure that governments can rely on. Populist emergency decrees are no way to deal with migration in an orderly way. Nationalist solutions are not the answer to pan-European challenges.”
Upcoming events
On Wednesday, 17 April, at 17:00 in the European Parliament, President Iratxe García will be one of the hosts of the screening of Oscar-winning documentary “20 days in Mariupol”. The cross-party event will also welcome Iryna Vereshchuk, Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine and Minister for Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories of Ukraine, Vadym Boychenko, Mayor of Mariupol and Vaagn Mnatsakanyan, protagonist of the documentary.
Seats are limited. If interested, please reserve yours here.
Upcoming activities
Today, Socialists and Democrats are meeting Amazon workers and trade union representatives in Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands to hear first-hand stories of employees and to discuss how to empower them so they can stand up to Amazon’s exploitation and abuses. The Europe-wide Amazon action day, coordinated by UNI Europa, the European Services Workers Union, is a pledge to take further steps to make the multinational pay decent wages and respect workers’ rights.
S&D MEPs are taking action and travelling across Europe. The Group’s employment and social affairs spokesperson Agnes Jongerius is going to Almelo (NL), vice-presidents Gaby Bischoff and Marc Angel as well as Birgit Sippel and Udo Bullmann to Frankfurt (DE), Iban García del Blanco to Madrid (ES) and Brando Benifei to Milan (IT). More details on our demands can be found here.
This Saturday, 13 April, our MEP Andreas Schieder is travelling to Skopje to support our sister party, SDS Makedonija, ahead of the May elections. Ever since the beginning of North Macedonia’s journey towards the European Union, our sister party’s leading voices – Stevo Pendarovski and Dimitar Kovachevski – have been the only leaders in the country truly committed to European values. It is thanks to them that this country is a success story of the Western Balkans.
We are also getting ready for the last plenary session of this mandate. From 22 to 25 April, we will be in Strasbourg with a full agenda, which includes prohibiting products made with forced labour on the Union market, combating violence against women and domestic violence, EU disability cards, the banking union and the 20th anniversary of the biggest EU enlargement.
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