Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-06-11-Speech-2-150"
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"en.20020611.8.2-150"2
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"Madam President, Madam Vice-President of the Commission, ladies and gentlemen, the fathers of Europe at Laeken – there were probably no mothers there – gave the Convention on the future of Europe something more than a year in which to achieve a big success in the process of making Europe more visible, by drafting the text of a new constitutional treaty.
A quite disproportionately small part of the Convention's work will be devoted to preparing solutions to the issues now raised in the Gil-Robles Gil-Delgado report – a uniform system for elections to Parliament, which will then truly merit the name of ‘European’, solutions under the heading of ‘regionalisation’ to the system's proximity – or lack of it – to the citizens, and to the problem of how to make it possible to use the elections to the European Parliament to reach a decision on how to give Europe a face, that is, by the direct election of the President of the Commission. There is, alas, nothing of any real substance on the subject of European lists. Work on these few topics has to date taken the Council and Parliament almost thirty years, not always with much by way of results.
is still the watchword for the organising of elections to the European Parliament.
Quite apart from many other aspects, it is precisely this bewildering array of proceedings every fifth June that makes it easy for the European public to regard European elections as unimportant or incomprehensible. Turnouts of under 50% are their reaction to this deplorable state of affairs. What is to be done under such circumstances? Do we put a brave face on a bad job, rejoice in small improvements, thank the rapporteur for his good work and await the miracle that the Convention will bring to pass in fifteen months' time, changing everything and making it better?
I accept the compromise and join in thanking our rapporteur Mr Gil-Robles Gil-Delgado, and I call on everyone to wish the Convention and its members success in making the impossible possible, giving Europe a comprehensible and workable structure that the citizen can understand, with electoral laws by which the public will know themselves to be challenged to join in deciding what the future of our shared European home should be."@en1
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"Vive la différence"1
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