Warm good wishes also from my counterpart and friend Catherine Colonna. We have just been in Münster together for the G7 meeting in the Hall of Peace – the venue was chosen very deliberately – where the Peace of Westphalia was concluded in 1648, bringing an end to the terrible, brutal Thirty Years’ War. This peace treaty, the Peace of Westphalia, also established a new principle for our common Europe that remains crucial for Europe to this day, namely this: peace through law. Following the Second World War, it was on this principle that we together built our European peace order. This principle lies at the heart of our European Union, and it is an integral part of the Franco‑German friendship. Today this principle is literally under fire. With its brutal attack on Ukraine, Russia has also attacked the European peace order. Over the past few months, we have together given a clear response to this attack, in the European Union, in the United Nations, in NATO, in the G7 and – this is important – in the G20. We have shown that together we are stronger than this dreadful war. Let me be quite clear: we would not have managed this without France and Germany working resolutely side by side.

Germany has no closer ties than those with France. With no other country do we coordinate so closely as with France – day in, day out. One reflection of this, as the two Presidents of Parliament have already made clear, is the Élysée Treaty with the reconciliation between our societies after the Second World War. Another is the Treaty of Aachen, which made our friendship the core of our political identity.

But our partnership extends far beyond treaties, and nobody knows that better than all of you parliamentarians from our two countries. Many of you have long maintained close relations with your parliamentary colleagues in the neighbouring country. But the value of our strong democracies is that we are not only politicians sitting in government or parliamentary buildings; first and foremost, we are also out and about, in our towns and villages and in our communities, experiencing on a daily basis these relationships between people, the twinning arrangements, the exchanges between our constituencies. Some of you – in fact probably almost the majority of you – come from border regions where you bring people together in the midst of their day‑to‑day lives: from cross-border tramlines to school exchanges to the bilingual university entrance qualification. You all breathe life into our friendship every single day.

I am happy that our most important neighbour is also our best friend. This trust is infinitely precious and certainly not to be taken for granted. And, in this very difficult and occasionally brutal time, I think we should keep reminding ourselves that friendship costs something. One has to invest in friendship, especially – this, too, has already been said – on those occasions when our opinions happen to differ; because we are confronted by considerable challenges, challenges that we can only overcome together.

The people of Ukraine are facing a hard winter. The Russian President is deliberately bombing Ukrainian infrastructure: water, electricity and heat are therefore as precious as never before in this ever so brutal war. That is why we have coordinated closely within the EU on winter relief and decided on it together again as the G7. But within the scope of Franco-German cooperation between Catherine Colonna and myself, we have just come up with proposals for how to strategically reshape our relations with Russia, also beyond the current time; because we are in absolute agreement with France that Putin’s Russia will be a threat to us in the foreseeable future.

We also need the Franco-German partnership to contain the climate crisis. The Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) has been ongoing in Sharm el‑Sheikh since yesterday, and Catherine is already there. Probably no previous UN Climate Change Conference has taken place under such difficult geopolitical circumstances. Nevertheless, we will do our utmost to get an ambitious outcome. We will fight to the end for every tenth of a degree less in global warming, and we will show solidarity with the countries for which the climate crisis is already a matter of life and death.

Ladies and gentlemen, these are all difficult tasks. But, as politicians, we are all professional optimists. That is why I am convinced that, together, Germany and France will work with their partners to reorganise our European security. We will strengthen our European sovereignty, and we will develop the EU as a geopolitical actor.

For that, we need trust; but we also need honest discussions between friends. Precisely the fact that we are not always of the same opinion and don’t always take the same approach is, after all, what makes our friendship special. That’s why, time and again, we inject shared momentum. Or, to put it another way, not a single family exists where everyone is always of exactly the same opinion. One might sometimes get irritated with one’s spouse for not putting the lid on the toothpaste. But the value of such a relationship lies in not arguing about the little things, but focusing on the underlying profound connection. And I feel the confidence in our partnership every day, in our very concrete cooperation.

And, because it sometimes takes more than two Foreign Ministers or two Presidents of Parliament or two spouses, I am very grateful to you all for the contributions you make as parliamentarians, by breathing life into the Franco-German relationship every day, in friendship, but also in working groups. Because that, too, characterises our parliaments.

Ensemble, nous sommes plus forts que cette guerre. Vive l’amitié franco-allemande! Vive la liberté! Vive l’Europe!

Merci beaucoup. Thank you very much.