Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-03-20-Speech-3-059"
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"en.20020320.5.3-059"2
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".
Thank you very much, Mr President. I would first like to say that I think the results of Barcelona were positive overall. No one can deny this, although maybe there are those who wanted even more, and those, as we have heard today, who even wanted less in some respects, but in general the results were positive.
To a large extent the results were positive due to the work of three institutions: Parliament, the Commission and the Council, in other words, simply due to the correct functioning of the Community method, and I think that this is the first reason why we have to congratulate everyone here. Barcelona produced results. Barcelona made progress insofar as, for a considerable amount of time, we have been working shoulder to shoulder, with particular cooperation from Parliament, making a considerable effort to enable those results to be produced.
Mr President, in Spain we say that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and that is what I would say to those who did not think that it was very much. I think that we have to look at the results in all areas, including in foreign policy, on issues as important as the declaration on the Middle East, and I do not want to go on to other issues that are to a lesser degree within the scope of the Commission. The balance is positive if we focus on matters that are very specifically the responsibility of the Commission and part of Community policy, when we talk about the progress on guaranteeing pensions, on employment, on the integration of the markets, on the creation of Europe, on providing a backbone in physical and spatial terms for its territory, for example through the interconnection of energy and transport, on support for environmental policy, not only in the specific environmental chapter, in which there are very important elements that were pointed out by Mr de Miguel a moment ago, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Monterrey agreements. The same should be said of specific policies when, for example, in the transport chapter, in answer to one of the specific comments that has been made, we talk about promoting more environmentally friendly transport, such as the railways and maritime transport.
Considerable progress has also been made on energy, with a directive on the taxation of energy, something that is without doubt a key issue within the development model that we are advocating in Europe, which is in no way based on cheap energy, but quite the contrary. When we look at all the progress that has been made, I repeat that the perfect is the enemy of the good, that there is a great deal of good and that the Community method has worked.
Finally, Mr President, very briefly, I must say that as a politician and a Member of Parliament for more than thirteen years – and I hope that one day the confidence of the Spanish people will mean that I can take on those tasks again – I want to make something very clear: political legitimacy lies in parliaments and democratically-elected governments, full stop. Other types of demonstration, which represent what is called civil society, are very important, and any politician who wishes to continue to have popular support will take good note of what those demonstrations mean, and will incorporate what those social groups say as much as possible, but obviously what we cannot do is replace democracy and the democratic and political legitimacy of the votes that are cast for the representatives of the people with demonstrations, however important they may be, because they are completely different things and should not be confused.
They are different issues. There were hundreds of thousands of citizens who demonstrated peacefully, as is usually the case with this type of demonstration, except at the last minute the hooligans appeared, whom we know and who unfortunately had not been intercepted by the State security forces in advance. And there were a few problems. However, Mr President, we repeat that legitimacy lies in this Parliament and in the national parliaments, and there was clearly legitimacy in the European Council with the Heads of State and Government of 15 democratic countries along with the Commission, which was taking part."@en1
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