Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-10-13-Speech-3-042"
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"en.20041013.3.3-042"2
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"Mr President, I wish to begin with some congratulatory remarks. One of your key aims was successful enlargement of the European Union. In May this year the EU welcomed ten new Member States in the largest expansion since its creation. This was a historic moment in the post-Cold War history of our continent and it is only right to acknowledge your role in attaining this political milestone. I also wish to say that the Commission has developed some, at least, of the more liberal economic strategies that your successor has now pledged to advance. The Lisbon Strategy was embarked upon under your watch but, sadly, too little progress has been made and Mr Wim Kok’s report to the Council in November will probably reveal this.
However, the positive remarks about the Commission end there. For the past five years the Commission has become fatally addicted to constitutional change. When you spoke to Parliament in 2000, setting out your priorities as President, you said: ‘Europe’s citizens are disenchanted and anxious. They have lost faith in the European institutions’. I am afraid that the intervening period has brought us the Constitutional Convention, the IGC and what may eventually be an EU Constitution. It is clear from the turnout in this year’s European elections that this process has failed to inspire. Indeed, it has reinforced the perception across Europe that institutions like the Commission are too self-serving.
In that 2000 speech you also said that a simple benchmark of whether the EU had delivered would be a higher turnout in the 2004 European Parliamentary elections. One of the key reasons for your goal not being reached has been this obsession with constitutional change, which means very little to our constituents. At the same time – and it saddens me to say this, particularly as Vice-President Kinnock is sitting alongside you in the Chamber – too little progress has been made on the reform of the Commission.
I regret to say that all this was inevitable, because over the past 12 months the Commission has been rudderless. I make no apology for saying that this is in large measure due to your decision to spend a significant amount of your time attacking Mr Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, and constructing alliances to challenge him. These activities have undermined the impartiality of the office of the President of the Commission and have ensured that the Commission has come to be seen as something of a lame duck. All presidents are entitled to their political opinions, but I regret to say that your political interventions have been …"@en1
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