Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-05-22-Speech-2-213"
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"en.20070522.23.2-213"2
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"Mr President, how often, over recent months, have I asked myself, ‘where is Romano Prodi? Where are the governments who will defend the Constitution?’ Today, Prime Minister, I have found you once more; I have found Romano Prodi on the barricades. I may have found him late in the day, but I have found him all the same. I found him speaking up for consensus, stepping out from the ranks of the governments who, day in and day out, exchange their historic responsibility for Europe for petty cash.
Since you, Prime Minister, said that we have to respect the arguments of others, I would like to ask you which others you mean. If you mean the members of the public, including those who voted ‘no’, then I am unperturbed. We know what they want; they want more democracy, more transparency, more social responsibility, a better Europe, a more convincing constitution. Or do you, by ‘others’, mean the governments who misuse the crisis around the ratification process to abuse us with their old demands, their old claims to power, with all the things we, in the Convention, extracted from those who deliberately deflect public dissatisfaction onto Europe in order to retain their power over a Europe without European democracy, without a social dimension, and without a shared role in the world – those whose interest is in the struggles of reactionaries for power, pitting the Europe of the corridors of power against the Europe of citizens?
You spoke of our need for compromises, and that, too, throws up a very pertinent question. The compromise that shines out of the twelve questions is compromise as a historic lie about Europe, for what also needs to be done, Prime Minister – and I am particularly grateful to you for making it visible – is to retain not only the substance, but also the spirit of the Constitution. If we decide that laws are no longer to be called laws, but rather regulations, we are denying people the historic legitimacy to which they have a claim, for these things remain, as far as their substance is concerned, laws. Denial of the primacy of European law is false, for it continues to have a subterranean existence and the foreign minister is still what we wanted him to be. No, indeed, the compromise can be neither a bluff nor a lie. It is for the spirit of the Constitution, too, that we have to fight."@en1
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