Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-01-16-Speech-2-024"
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"en.20070116.3.2-024"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I shall start by following the previous speaker’s example and addressing thanks to Mr Wurtz, Mr Bonde and Mrs Frassoni. We have had a worthy election, a worthy debate, which was always fair and friendly in every respect. I congratulate the three on the results they have achieved, and you, Mr President, on being elected to preside over this Chamber.
I can tell you, Mr Poettering, that the Socialist Group in the European Parliament will work together faithfully with you in your presidential capacity, and, by the same token, expect the President to exercise his office in complete neutrality and be a constantly reliable and loyal partner to our group. Nobody who knows you, Mr Poettering, can have even the least doubt that you will do that, and so we are full of confidence as we embark on the forthcoming two and a half years of working together with you as the newly-elected President of this House and in which it is to be hoped that we, together, will help to make European integration a success.
Mr President, being among those who have been privileged to get to know you rather better over recent years, I claim the right to add a personal comment to the congratulations I bring on behalf of my group. Everyone who knows you better and in your private capacity, knows that your political stance is inseparable from your personal situation and the course your life has taken. You were born in September 1945, and anyone who knows you will know that your father was killed in March 1945, in the last days of the Second World War, and you yourself never knew him. I am sure that this experience of childhood and youth without a father was one from which you learned, that it led into European politics and into the work of European unification, and that it was this experience – which, in Germany, and among people of your generation, is actually commonplace rather than unique – that motivated you to strive for European integration in the way that you have done.
It is this work of integration, the important part you have played in it, your personality as one active within it, the course of your life, that has now brought you to the head of this European Parliament, and so I would like to add to what I have said that I am certain that, if our nation, our people, had been able to take a path different to the one it actually did; if your father had not been killed in action; if he had been able to see where his son’s – Hans-Gert Poettering’s – path led him, he would certainly have been proud of his son, just as your sons have, today, every right to be proud of their father. Well done!"@en1
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