Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-03-Speech-2-283"
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".
I would firstly like to answer the question on the relationship between the processes of the Commission and of Parliament.
Of course we could consider a long-term programme – five years – but, in our opinion, this period of time is excessive. If we do not talk about five years, the problems the honourable Member mentions will always exist. It is either one year or any figure greater than one year presents us with these problems. However, I believe that the concern is that two or three years raises the problem, as does four years. It is either five or one. Five is too much, one means that we have less room for manoeuvre.
In any event I believe that it is a false problem. Because the necessary modifications can be discussed annually and therefore this does not cause any difficulty, as I said earlier to Mr Goebbels, and if a change in circumstances or an institutional change requires the problem to be reassessed, this can clearly be done.
The second point: what happens with the Employment Ecofin and to what extent may contradictions arise? Contradictions in the process are precisely what we are trying to prevent, for a very simple reason: the process starts with the Commission, with a position which must be consistent; that position must be decided on or approved by the European Council; the Ecofin Councils and the Employment Council will have to work on the guidelines produced by the spring European Council, and it will be the June European Council that finally accepts guidelines which must be consistent amongst themselves and consistent with what the European Council itself has proposed. Therefore, this type of incoherence should not arise.
An issue which I believe to be totally outside today’s debate is the Stability Pact. I am not going to say too much about this. The Stability Pact is part of Community legislation. My position is very well known: I believe that the legislation has to be complied with and therefore my position is that the Stability Pact must be applied as laid down in the legislation currently in force.
This does not mean that the Commission is insensitive to the experience which the Pact has provided us with and that it has not proposed – the Commission itself – a series of interpretative elements in accordance with economic developments, including such important elements as, for example, taking account of the cyclically adjusted budgets in order to assess the reality in terms of the possibility of achieving the nominal objectives laid down in the stability programmes.
I still believe that the Stability Pact is an excellent instrument and that we must naturally draw the best possible conclusions from the reality of the situation so that the Pact may function better, but not so that the substance of the Pact is affected.
My final point: the legitimacy of the process, raised by Mrs Randzio-Plath. I believe that the process has all the legitimacy available at the moment; in fact it has even more, given that not only the sectoral Councils are involved in these decisions, but also the European Council at the beginning and the end of the process and, secondly, not only is the current commitment maintained, or the current participation of the European Parliament, but the intention is to increase it.
The honourable Member raises another problem: what type of modification of the Treaty can be considered in the future with a view to greater participation by the European Parliament in this process? This Communication says nothing about this issue. This is an issue under discussion in the Convention, and the eventual result will depend on the negotiation at the Intergovernmental Conference."@en1
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