Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-10-26-Speech-2-011"
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"en.19991026.2.2-011"2
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".
Mr President, you will understand, ladies and gentlemen, that it is a great honour for me to be able to take the floor today. I have had a seat in this Parliament for ten years now, and I have never had the opportunity to speak for fifteen minutes before, which, considering my temperament, has been a long-lasting source of frustration, and is finally coming to an end today!
At the same time, the priorities of yesterday and today are being sacrificed, and this is unacceptable, in favour of the priorities of tomorrow. I think this is a serious point. In Category 4, the Council makes the completely unacceptable proposal to implement across-the-board cuts without any justification whatsoever. We have clearly understood that there must be reductions on condition that they are at least justified, but in this case they are not, I must insist. We have been told that it is necessary to finance Kosovo, Morocco, Timor and Turkey. Admittedly, Timor and Turkey are not in the draft budget yet, but we shall surely find them there in time. We have been told that all this must be financed and, in return, there will be cuts in all the traditional expenditure for the development appropriations for Africa, Asia, Latin America. Parliament says no. We shall not accept making Africa, Latin America and Asia, everyone bar Europe, pay for Kosovo. It is not acceptable.
More generally, we consider the fact that the Commission is undertaking this type of approach for the future to be very serious, since we shall have to bear the cost of these new responsibilities from structural funds. And we cannot expect to pay for the Balkans, for example, in a structural and lasting way by means of enlargement, etc. No, we cannot get out of it that way. You cannot get the foot of Charlemagne’s mother
(Berthe Big-Foot), into Cinderella’s slipper. It is just not possible. You have to make the shoe bigger, to take into account the needs we must fund.
This is the situation as we see it. We are waiting for the Commission to make a statement on this point. The PDB obviously did not take some items of expenditure into account, but it was very clear. All we want to know now is whether the Commission is going to defend it. I should warn you, Commissioner, of a proposal which may be made to substantially reduce your own PDB, for it would be a serious matter if the Commission were not even to defend its own policy. We would be in a situation even more paradoxical than I am willing to accept, setting up Parliament as defender of the Commission’s preliminary draft budget, replacing the Commission as guardian of the major policies decided by the European Union. I should warn you on this point. It would be a serious matter.
What is Parliament’s response? It is quite simple. It rejects this attitude. It considers, on the one hand, that it is necessary to face up to the new priorities. There are essentially two of these. Firstly, administratively, it is necessary to deal with the consequences of the institutional crisis which we experienced last winter. This entails active support, and even an active demand for administrative reform addressed to the Commission. All the measures relating to TAOs have that objective, in the same way as all the appropriations for OLAF. The call for the creation of a new administrative instrument, a sort of executive agency or decentralised executive unit, fulfils a real need. We have initiated contacts with the Commission which seem to be productive. We have heard the words, we are now waiting for the deeds.
Internationally, our second priority is effectively to finance, by some means, the main priorities: Kosovo with up to EUR 500 million, the agreement on Morocco with up to EUR 125 million, the programmes for Turkey and Timor with up to EUR 50 and EUR 30 million. In this regard, we have voted on an amendment which corresponds to a serious political commitment from this Parliament, even if we vote it before Category 4, which means that it does not to date have the status of an amendment, but it does constitute a commitment on the part of this House to vote in these appropriations at second reading, especially regarding the Morocco agreement which is one of Parliament’s political priorities.
The second approach adopted by the European Parliament is not to sacrifice our traditional priorities. This is why we have rejected en masse all the across-the-board cuts proposed by the Council and we consider that we must face up to requirements in the areas of redevelopment, development, international development, social actions and environmental policy. We must face up to all these expenses with great energy and we must not accept their being sacrificed.
Just now, I left out one essential point, research, within the framework of administrative reform. We are waiting to formalise in writing and give concrete expression to the agreement which is in the pipeline between Commission and Parliament in order to guarantee better budgetary use of the appropriations under this sub-section.
We are therefore facing up to the new priorities but we are not sacrificing our traditional priorities. Thirdly, this requires us, and this is the essence of the problem, to respect fully the terms of the interinstitutional agreement, but in a dynamic fashion. We are respecting this agreement. We are respecting all the ceilings in all the categories and we are even leaving substantial margins in some of them, such as Category 1B on rural development. But we want a dynamic interpretation, in accordance with what has been said and, in particular, we want an ongoing structural review of Category 4, rather than an annual review. There are new expenses which must be funded. These expenses are not just for one year, they are ongoing expenses. This must be translated into a net increase in the appropriations allocated to Category 4 for the entire period and not just for the budget for the year 2000. This is a demand which Parliament is making and I would like to see it taken fully into account by the Commission and by the Council.
What is the way out of this situation? The Council still has time to think and a choice of means. There is the time to think as we are to meet on 25 November, Saint Catherine’s Day. There is a French saying “
” (on Saint Catherine’s Day, every tree takes root), so I hope that the budget tree will take root. As for the choice of means, Madam President, you and your colleagues have to choose, for I know that you cannot do everything, and I am sorry for this, between two avenues. One alternative is to review the Financial Perspective of Category 4 which will make it possible for us to vote in this budget by facing up to the new priorities in accordance with the commitments undertaken at the time of negotiating this agreement. If you do not want to go down this road, Parliament shall then be forced to resort to the strict application of Article 272 of the Treaty, and to assume the powers, which it is entitled to do, regarding both commitments and payments, and to vote for appropriations which match up to the level of the commitments which are the political commitments of the European Union and in strict observance of the Treaty. Madam President, the ball is in your court.
I would like to tell you, Mr President, Madam President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, that preparing the budget of the European Union is a strange process indeed.
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What sort of budget is it, then, which is based on the principle that the budgetary authority and Parliament vote on the expenditure but not on the revenue? What sort of budget is it which necessitates making a distinction between two well-defined categories of expenditure, one being the compulsory expenditure determined by an authority – the Council – the other being the non-compulsory expenditure determined by Parliament? This distinction is patently absurd. What sort of budget is it which subordinates the budgetary authority to legislative texts to the extent that some figures and some amounts expressly stipulated in the legislation and in the programmes are so restrictive that they tend to reduce the budgetary procedure to a set of legislative adjustments which have already been carried out?
The situation is thus strange, to say the least. But it is even stranger still to draw up a budget within the framework of the interinstitutional agreement and the budget perspectives which we have. Effectively, we are working within the framework of the Financial Perspective decided in Berlin. Well, the least that one can say is that the programming exercise which took place there was quite strange, firstly in terms of its duration (setting a seven year programme in two days of Council meetings was perhaps risky) and vague in terms of the amounts. Today, we can see that however one approaches these needs there is only a very approximate matching of budget estimates and actual requirements.
In Category 1 on agriculture and market expenditure, we are already up to the limit of the margin. In Category 4 on external action – I shall return to this point – the Category is literally at bursting point. In Category 5, we do not know what the administrative reform of the Commission will cost, but it is with great concern that we see the problem of pensions taking shape before suitable expenditure has been envisaged; and in Category 7, intended for pre-accession preparations, the movement developing in favour of faster and wider enlargement, if I may say, is not supported by suitable appropriations. Countries such as Cyprus and Malta are in an uncertain situation already. The budget programming exercise was, therefore, vague, but also very restrictive for the European Parliament because, for the first time, we are working within a framework where we have obtained less flexibility in exchange for – not more money, as previously, but less money. The situation is inherently paradoxical.
The matter becomes thoroughly surreal when we tackle the subject of the financial year 2000, as the European Union is experiencing an absolute contradiction here. On the one hand, the Treaty of Amsterdam and the implementation of the single currency are creating new burdens, whilst on the other hand, the planned enlargement effectively entails an additional financial load. Finally, the increased weight of the Union’s responsibilities, especially as regards Kosovo, are also creating far greater tensions, far greater pressure on the budget. Well, confronted with this situation, some institutions, particularly the Council – I am wondering what the Commission will decide in the end – tell us that we are going to finance more policies, with more partners, take on more responsibility, with less money. I must say, Mr President, there is a paradox here, a contradiction which Parliament does not wish to accept.
This is the situation we find ourselves in. Budget 2000 is characterised by the paradox that I have just mentioned, of how to finance more with less money, but will also, I hope, be characterised by Parliament’s rejection of this paradox. How do the institutions seek to address this paradox? Well, by two methods, both very simple and equally reprehensible. The first involves cutting expenditure, and the second sacrificing traditional priorities in favour of new priorities. I find the draft budget, which the Council has submitted for our approval and whose inspiration we are objecting to, quite worrying from that point of view. When I speak of cutting expenditure, I am thinking, for example, of expenditure under Category I for which a cut has been proposed. The Commission already started off on the wrong track. Perhaps today it is starting to experience some regrets? In fact, across-the-board reductions have been proposed to us, which are not in line with the real situation. The same applies to payments. As regards structural funds, we have considerable payment requirements, due both to the implementation of the new instrument of Agenda 2000 but also to the vast weight of past commitments. This death rattle, which is the last gasp of the dying man – forgive me, interpreters, this is impossible to translate, it means the final hour has come – is the last gasp when the programmes of previous years finally expire.
All that entails considerable burdens as regards payment and, in this respect, the Council follows neither the Commission, nor us, and proposes a perfectly unacceptable reduction in relation to the preliminary draft budget.
Having demonstrated some vagueness on this question in recent months, the Commission seems recently to have returned to more laudable sentiments, which we are pleased to see. Thus, on the one hand, we have a cut in expenditure and the appropriations allocated to existing and future requirements. The same is true for expenditure under Category 5."@en1
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"A la Sainte-Catherine, tout arbre prend racine"1
"Berthe au grand pied"1
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