Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-03-22-Speech-3-220"
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"en.20060322.17.3-220"2
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".
Mr President, I, too, rejoice in the way in which this report makes it possible for us to take a significant step further towards the consolidation of the European political party.
The fact is that I do believe that, if we really do want to develop a real European parliamentary democracy, truly European political parties will play an important part in it. The resolution adopted several years ago in favour of funding parties quite separately from the groups strikes me as a very important step in this direction. It will not necessarily, however, play well with the public, who do not believe that it is necessary.
I believe, though, that we are obliged to describe political parties as being, in a sound parliamentary democracy, an important link between the public and the decision-making process and that this is not to be had for free. To put it another way, we must have the courage to tell the outside world that there is a price to be paid for democracy, that there is nothing abnormal about this, and that it is better that funding should be transparent and from public sources rather than through all manner of dark channels.
As I have already said, an important step in this area was taken a number of years ago. I believe that the time has come to make a few improvements, the most structurally important aspect of which will be, without a doubt, that the political parties can plan ahead over greater periods of time instead of having to work with one-year budgets and without any certainty as to what is going to happen the year after that.
There are also two significant technical amendments, which have to do with the flexibility of managing the budget.
I now want, in a sense, to misuse this platform to point out that the problem of the carrying-over to a subsequent year of anything on the credit side accumulated in a given year is not one faced by political parties alone. This rule appears to have crept into the set of rules generally imposed by the Commission. I have the same problem to contend with as chairman of the management council of the College of Europe, which is also required to spend money in a given year, or else a problem results and the upshot is poor management. It is better that there should be more flexibility in this respect, just as we are here proposing for political parties. I would like to bring to the Commissioner’s attention the fact that this problem does not exist only in political parties. This appears to be a general rule that the Commission applies even though it is an obstacle to good management and has been thought up by accountants, whose thinking I do not follow very well.
I also want to stress, by way of conclusion, that we can now, together with the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, do a considerable amount of important work towards a proper statute for political parties, which will include – disadvantageous though it may be to the state coffers of my own country – a fiscal statute that ties in better with the fiscal statute for the European institutions, so that it is made perfectly clear that the political parties are part of that specific management level and that they are integral parts of Europe’s institutional framework."@en1
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