Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-10-13-Speech-3-025"
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"en.20041013.3.3-025"2
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"Mr President, Mr Prodi, five years and one month ago you addressed this house as President-designate of an untested Commission. You told us that you wanted to put Europe at the service of the people of Europe. Liberals and Democrats backed you then, and five exhausting years later, we back you now.
Liberals and Democrats believe that in the long view of the Prodi Commission certain things will stand out. Your Commission launched the Lisbon Agenda and inaugurated the euro. Your Commission began the work of internal reform. It was the steward of Europe's enlargement from 15 to 25 states. Your Commission moved Europe into the world of common European security against terror.
You inherited a Commission badly scarred by scandal. You promised this House that you would put the Commission's house in order. That work is not finished, but it has been courageously championed by Commissioner Kinnock and you leave behind you a Commission in which reform has a firm foothold. As part of that process you have worked to make the Commission's relationship with this House open, productive and respectful. Your successor will do well to do the same.
Your Commission inherited a Europe searching for the road to economic reform. It leaves behind a Europe which found that road at Lisbon, however hesitantly we have stepped down it. In the service of the Lisbon Agenda your Commission has been an engine of intelligent, inventive, reformist single market legislation. Liberals and Democrats recognise and honour the exceptional personal stamp that Commissioner Bolkestein has placed on that work. In particular, the launch of the euro – the single largest logistical operation in Europe in 60 years – was a practical and political triumph.
Liberals and Democrats believe that we have not gone far enough on the road to economic reform or achieved what we could have. But if Europe is unlikely to achieve the Lisbon goals, the fault lies not with a Commission that failed to set the rules, but with Member States that too often failed to keep them. The Lisbon Agenda has too often been subordinated to the Paris Agenda or the Berlin Agenda or the London Agenda.
Your Commission inherited the battered but hopeful Europe of 1989, still divided by a line from Trieste to Gdansk. Today that line is gone, wiped away by an historic enlargement that this Commission has every right to take credit for. We recognise your work, and the work of Commissioner Verheugen and the work of the hundreds of dedicated Commission staff who made the climb.
Mr Prodi, in my country politicians most often get into trouble in their brushes with the other sex! I can think of two in your case: Penelope and Marta. You quickly dropped the first, and I am delighted to see today that you have finally ditched the second.
It is the conviction of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe that the Prodi Commission has honoured the commitments it made to this House five years ago. Some will use today the tired claim that you have been more interested in Italian politics than the stewardship of the European Commission. But how can one review the achievements of this Commission and then insist that you had only one foot in Brussels.
It was said of the Emperor Augustus of Rome – another Italian with a European destiny – that he inherited a city of brick and left behind a city of marble. Liberals and Democrats believe that handed a city of brick, your Commission leaves behind a bigger, better, wiser Europe. I can sum it all up in one Italian word, Mr Prodi:
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"bravo"1
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