Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-11-05-Speech-3-081"
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"en.20031105.7.3-081"2
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"Mr President, I believe it is highly symbolic that after the debate on enlargement, on the political reunification of the continent, we should hold this debate on the political reorganisation of the continent, which must end with the approval of the European Constitution; I believe that the two things are united and, as the Italian Presidency has quite rightly said, this must be the case so that we can go into the 2004 elections on the basis of a European Constitution.
I said the other day, Mr President, that I believed that so far the debates in the Intergovernmental Conference have produced a degree of frustration, and I explained this, like Klaus Hänsch, by saying that the debates we were seeing were a repetition of those we had held during the Convention. There was nothing new and
as Michel Barnier has already said very correctly
all that was being produced was a reduction of what had been obtained.
I must also say that we should find cause for satisfaction in it, because it ultimately means that the Convention did good work and if the governments present back to us what they presented to us then, that means that what we supported then was the solution which achieved the greatest consensus.
I would like to refer to an issue which has been the subject of the last meeting at ministerial level and which has been the cause of great concern to the representatives of Parliament. I am referring to the intention of the ECOFIN Council of Ministers to make a series of proposals which, at the end of the day, meant entirely undoing the compromise achieved by the Convention on Title VII of the Constitution on the Union's finances. This was a compromise which was mulled over at length, involving four working groups chaired by Mr Amato, Mr Hänsch, Mr Christophersen and Mr Méndez de Vigo. This compromise was based on three key ideas, which have been this Parliament’s banner over the last ten years: achieving greater democracy, achieving greater efficiency and achieving greater transparency.
That compromise was also based on two ideas: the first was that, with regard to revenue, the governments should have the final word, since, at the end of the day, it is provided by the citizens of the Union; and secondly, with regard to spending, the European Parliament should have the final word, since it represents those same Union citizens.
Consequently, on the basis of the work of these four working groups, we proposed this compromise with three legs; the first one relates to own resources: own resources will be decided by the governments and subject to ratification by national parliaments; the second is the financial perspectives: the Inter-institutional Agreement is incorporated into the Constitution and they will be approved as from those of 2006 by a qualified majority in the Council and with the approval of the European Parliament; and, thirdly, the budget: Parliament will have the final word with regard to the spending chapter, the distinction, which has always seemed to us to be bizarre, between compulsory and non-compulsory expenditure having disappeared, but this is an approval subject to brakes and obstacles, since in order to have the final word, this Parliament must have a majority of 3/5.
By all this I mean, Mr President, that we are dealing with an agreement on three legs, and this Parliament
as my fellow Members well know
naturally believes that ratification by national parliaments of own resources is something which belongs to the past and also that the multi-annual financial framework should be something subject to the ordinary legislative procedure. This means that we, for the sake of compromise, have given ground because we believed that the principle according to which ‘the governments have the final word on revenue and Parliament has the final word on spending’ makes sense.
I would like to make it very clear that this Parliament has given ground for the sake of compromise and, therefore, I believe that at the moment the fact that this compromise, which is one of the key elements of the constitutional text, should be called into question and there should be an attempt to blur some of the elements of these three legs, makes no sense. So much so that I believe that, from this Parliament’s political point of view, and I would like to make this very clear, it will be totally unacceptable. It will be a red line for us. And we said this at the last meeting of the Intergovernmental Conference, and it has been accepted by the Italian Presidency as well and, while I was preparing this speech, Mr President, I received a note from the Ansa agency in which Mr Tremonti, President-in-Office of ECOFIN, says, and I will read in Italian:
[We believe it is essential that the text prepared by the Convention should be approved just as it is]. Well, let us take notice of Mr Tremonti and let us maintain the compromise on the issue of finances."@en1
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"‘Per noi é fondamentale che il testo preparato dalla Convenzione sia approbato così comme é’"1
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