Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-10-11-Speech-3-078"
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"en.20061011.14.3-078"2
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"Madam President, Anna Politkovskaja’s Danish friend cannot obtain a visa for Russia, and I have asked Mr Solana to raise this matter at a suitable opportunity.
I turn now to the Finnish Presidency. I love Finland. I sit on chairs, and put flowers in vases designed by Alvar Aalto and use a Nokia phone. I have had respect for Finnish politicians ever since I was a young man and I have cooperated with your foreign minister in the EEA and with your prime minister in the Convention. Now, I have to ask with some dismay: what has happened to Finland? How on earth can Finnish politicians persuade themselves to ratify a Constitution that has been rejected in France and the Netherlands and therefore no longer exists? Is it true that it is members of the Centre party’s parliamentary group who are to vote against their own conviction? The great majority of Finnish voters are opposed to the Constitution, yet you force it through without a referendum. Shame on you! Instead of submitting to Mr Vanhanen’s whip and adopting a new policy of Finlandisation whereby Finland turns itself into Germany’s seventeenth state, you should start afresh with a new directly elected Convention, referendums in all the countries and a document that the electorate can happily vote for.
Finland currently has 7.8% of the votes necessary for achieving a blocking minority in the Council of Ministers, so the other countries are obliged to listen to Finland. That is precisely why we have a valuable culture of consensus in the Council of Ministers. The Constitution would introduce double majority voting, with the result that we should be voting on the basis of population figures. That would cause the Finnish portion of a blocking minority to fall from 7.8% to 3.3%, so there would no longer be any need to listen to Finland and other small EU countries. The German share of the vote would correspondingly increase from 32% to 51%. Germany and Turkey would thus be able to determine the speed at which an enlarged EU developed. A double majority would destroy the EU’s culture of consensus, and the removal of the national Commissioners would make it difficult to get the EU to operate properly on a day-to-day basis. Nokia would no doubt get by, but the many small and medium-sized companies and local authorities would miss having contact through the Finnish
when there was no longer a Finnish Commissioner at the table. Moreover, the rotation system would only, of course, continue until, true enough, the turn of the wheel replaced France with Malta. Stick to one Commissioner for each Member State and to the culture of consensus in the Council of Ministers instead of adopting the rejected draft Constitutional Treaty."@en1
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"cabinet"1
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