Vito Bonsignore, on behalf of the PPE-DE Group. – (IT) Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, we are talking about the manufacturing sector in the European Union that produces a third of the cars produced in the world. In Europe, the sector employs three million people in addition to all the indirect employment, and it is one of the key industries for the world as a whole in terms of direct sales, indirect sales and total number of people employed.

Let us also consider that today, while we are having this debate, the most recent estimates say that over the coming year, the numbers of unemployed people throughout the European Union will double. Personally, I believe that even this estimate is optimistic. I agree with the Commissioner that the car industry should receive assistance, in the attempts that we have requested to produce cars with low emissions and low fuel consumption. We need to aid change, not penalise those who are left behind, and we need to link funding to innovation. If helping car firms to recover may seem burdensome, the bankruptcy of some of them would cost the EU much, much more.

The sector is in crisis, throughout the world, and we can find a way out of this situation by making a technological advance – here we are in agreement – and therefore we need to decide between producing 21st century cars in Europe or losing this manufacturing activity to countries which are coming close to producing low-technology, low-cost cars in large quantities, such as India or China.

It is true that banks are now no longer lending money, that the large automobile firms are using up the liquidity that they had previously built up, and which had existed up until halfway through this year, and that the market has shrunk significantly and will end 2008 with negative figures and, I believe, Mr Jouyet, with a percentage figure closer to two digits, while my forecasts for 2009 are pessimistic.

Europe has a great opportunity: to support, without discrimination, structural changes to the sector with long-term, low-interest loans and assistance for research.