Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-09-26-Speech-1-024"
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"en.20050926.11.1-024"2
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".
Mr President, many thanks for what you said about the general direction of our work over the coming year. I extend a warm welcome to our friends from Romania and Bulgaria, no matter what their political allegiance: a particularly warm welcome to those who belong to my own group, but a welcome nonetheless to those of differing views, coupled with the hope that we will work well together in this House for the good of the European Union. What I also ask of them is that they work hard and debate hard in this House, for the European Union has need of that too.
It is in this Parliament that European democracy happens, so let me pick up what my good friend Mr Poettering said. I do indeed share his view that we cannot accept the Commission’s way of passing information around, which involves it, through the medium of Commissioner Verheugen, telling the
what it wants to withdraw, followed by Mr Barroso, the following day, telling the international press what he is withdrawing, so that Parliament has, to this day, not been officially informed, even though the Commission is obliged to do so by the Interinstitutional Agreement.
Parliament is surely entitled, though, to know what is going on in the secret corridors of power in this building. One opportunity to tell it would have been last Thursday in the Conference of Presidents, when Mr Barroso could have done the job. He was, of course, invited, but said he could not be there. I was then told that the reason why he would not be there was that Mr Poettering was not there. Well, I said, there you go: if Mr Poettering is not there, then there is no point! Looking at the newspapers today, I now learn where Mr Barroso was last Thursday, when his absence was unavoidable. The Chairman of the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats may well get worked up about our not being informed, but we could have been last Thursday, had not Mr Poettering, together with President Barroso, been attending an event in Lisbon staged by the European People’s Party’s think-tanks. You should not go complaining to the Commission if it is you yourself who ensure that the appointments intended for us to be informed cannot be kept.
I am not aiming these remarks at Mr Poettering, for that is not his job. I have some sympathy for him, but none for the President of the Commission. Commissioner Wallström, you can tell Mr Barroso from me that I will not accept a situation in which the President of the Commission tells the international press what he intends to do, but not the European Parliament. That is unacceptable!
Nor can I see it as acceptable that a President of the Commission, should, in a press conference on the occasion of his return from holiday – which must have been a long one, for I have heard nothing from him for a long time – say that there was no point in concentrating on the Constitution, which was going to be a long time coming anyway, and that now was the time for us to focus on something else: that from someone whose task it is to contend for this same Constitution!
I really do wonder what the President of the Commission’s attitude is towards those states that actually have ratified the Constitution, or towards those currently in the process of doing so. What are they, faced with a Commission President such as this one, actually meant to think?
I have no quibble with the substance of this; it is indeed the case that we have to make a better job of making laws, and that superfluous ones need to be withdrawn. With that I wholeheartedly agree, but let me make it abundantly clear, Mr President, that the work programme you have announced for the coming year cannot be gone through in the same way as its predecessors. It is all about cooperation between the European institutions, between the Commission and Parliament in particular, but what I then expect of the Commission is that it should meet Parliament halfway and make Parliament – rather than a press conference or the Commission’s briefings in Brussels – the venue for debate about the future of Europe.
That is the only way that we will reach any sort of agreement, not least on the Financial Perspective. Let me just remind you that, between Parliament’s figures – our proposals, in other words – and those that the Summit failed to adopt, by which I mean the 1.07% compromise that was on the table there, there is a gulf of several billions, but between the demands the Commission makes on the Financial Perspective and what the Council actually wants there is a yawning chasm amounting to double that amount again. Any President of the Commission who wanted to implement his own ambitious programme ought, after the failure of the Financial Perspective, to have made a scene about it and denounced it as a road to ruin for the European Union!
What I am criticising, Mr President, is the Commission’s far too lengthy absence from the debate on the Financial Perspective and the Constitution. While wholeheartedly endorsing your proposals, we also hope that the Commission – and its President in particular – will soon get back on the playing field."@en1
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