Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-10-25-Speech-2-019-000"
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"en.20111025.5.2-019-000"2
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"Madam President, according to the President-in-Office and the Commissioner, the European Semester is a great success. I have my doubts, however. In all the recommendations that have been made to the Member States, there is a major common factor, which is that they have only looked at government expenditure, which needs to be cleaned up as much as possible. That is the dominant theme in the Commission’s recommendations.
Commissioner Dalli says that the Commission will take a broader approach next time, which will encompass employment. That is an improvement, but it is not what the European Semester is intended for. The Semester is supposed to help realise the Europe 2020 strategy. There are five key indicators for the strategy – namely, employment, research and development and innovation, education, poverty or social exclusion and climate change and energy. These issues are supposed to be the core issues and the recommendations need to home back in on them.
We have looked into what account has been taken of all these different indicators. Our investigation showed that the Commission had put forward all kinds of recommendations that do not correspond to the key indicators. I will give some examples. When it comes to the important issue of energy saving, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands have not even set a target, yet the Commission does not even mention these two Member States in the recommendations. A second example concerns the R&D budget. Here, too, the Netherlands has said that it will not attain the stipulated three per cent target, but will instead reach 2.5%. I have put questions to the Commission about this. What was the Commission’s response? They said that 2.5% is also good. In other words, the three per cent target is absolutely not important to the Commission. In that case, it should say so.
If that is the Commission’s position, simply make it clear that the Europe 2020 strategy is no longer important and that we simply need to look at the economic indicators. Be honest about it. We want the Europe 2020 indicators to be properly looked at and for that to be a democratic process. Involve the European Parliament, the national parliaments and civil society organisations and look at all the indicators, or else be honest and ditch the Europe 2020 strategy."@en1
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