Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-06-06-Speech-1-101"
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"en.20050606.14.1-101"2
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"Mr President, last week’s referenda in France and the Netherlands were a dramatic reminder of how little legitimacy the European Union now has in the eyes of the peoples of Europe. The EU is rightly viewed as a project ever more driven by an elite. A political elite with no genuine mandate from the people rides roughshod over the public and their national institutions in ever more areas of political life. In Sweden, a scientific investigation is carried out each year into the population’s confidence in about twenty different institutions. The Commission and this House – the European Parliament – are at the bottom of the list.
There are many politically committed people such as ourselves who wish to rescue the European integration project from the attempts to create a European superstate. We wish to make it once again a project of cooperation between independent countries of equal value which trust one another and to limit it to areas such as the internal market and cross-border environmental problems. The attempts to push the EU towards being a United States of Europe without popular support now threatens the survival of the integration project.
However, it is not only the attempts by the political elite to push ahead with the creation of a supranational EU against the will of the people that undermines the legitimacy of the EU. It is generally apparent that the European peoples associate the EU with top-down government, bureaucracy and corruption. In this very debate in the House, it is, moreover, corruption and fraud with which we are dealing.
I wish greatly to commend Mr Bösch for his report. It was painstakingly prepared and contains sound proposals that I support wholeheartedly. At the same time, our work in the Committee on Budgetary Control shows how difficult it is to get on top of fraud. There is some basic systemic error we are not getting at. Money disappears year in and year out via agricultural policy and regional policy. There is barely any clear sign of improvement.
Those officials who reveal scandals in the EU bureaucracy are routinely frozen out, dismissed or given early retirement. EU history is littered with the corpses of all these whistleblowers. A number of scandals are revealed in other ways but, normally, there is never any legal process. This cannot be allowed to continue, and it is now Commissioner Kallas’s responsibility to ensure that this development does not continue into the future and undermine the little confidence in the EU that the EU’s population still has left."@en1
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