Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-06-11-Speech-2-136"
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"en.20020611.8.2-136"2
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"Madam President, I would like to congratulate the rapporteur for his work. He is wise to recommend that Parliament gives its assent to the position that the Council has adopted.
This is one of the only areas under the Treaty where it is the Parliament and not the Commission which has the right of initiative. We took this initiative some years ago, the Council has acted on our text, and indeed incorporated most of the essential elements that we wished to see incorporated into the uniform electoral system, or at least the common principles for the system.
Our argument that proportional representation should be obligatory in every Member State is accepted. I come from the last Member State to have introduced proportional representation for European elections and am glad that this will now be recognised as a principle to be applied across all Member States. It also recognises that so that not everything is done at the level of highly centralised national lists, regional constituencies, which are closer to the people, should be possible, especially in the larger Member States.
The report also recommends that we bring to an end, although this will be phased in, the dual mandate whereby Members sit both in the European Parliament and in their national parliament. That is an attempt to do two full-time jobs at once: it is no longer feasible, it is no longer tenable and it is right to phase it out.
All in all, we can approve this text although it is not fully satisfactory in every respect, but that is part of the give and take of the European Union, part of the process of accommodation that we go through and we can accept it. My group will therefore be voting for the report by Mr Gil-Robles.
We have a problem, however, with recital D. This recital begins by stating that we regret that the single European constituency, which Parliament proposed, will not be introduced. The problem here is that Parliament did not propose that, Parliament said that it was something that could be examined for the future, as of the 2009 elections. The text even says that we regret that it is not to be introduced in time for the next European elections, when we did not even envisage it as a possibility for the next European elections. If we are serious as a parliament, even those amongst us who support the idea of 10% of the seats being elected in this way, we should take this particular recital out of the text because it actually contradicts the facts and our proposals. We will be doing ourselves no good by regretting that the Council did not approve something which we did not even propose. With that small reservation, I can support the text and my group will be voting in favour of the rest of it."@en1
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