Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-10-Speech-3-163"
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"en.20040310.4.3-163"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, throughout the years in which we in this House busied ourselves with resolutions on the enlargement process, I sometimes found it disconcerting when we made quite detailed and precise demands of the countries concerned, imposing on them requirements with which we ourselves did not comply and telling them that this, this and that had to be utterly changed.
So I found Commissioner Verheugen’s comment on agricultural policy this morning very helpful. Perhaps we ought really to be considering whether, if the accession countries’ administrations cannot implement these things quite that fast, the problem might not lie with us rather than with the countries of which we demand these things. After they have joined us, I would like to see a lot of our dead weight subjected to scrutiny, as we in Germany had to do after reunification, in order to take a look at all the red tape that had accumulated over the years and to consider whether the new Member States might not perhaps be able to provide us with more flexible and quicker solutions.
All this is by way of general comment. I am the shadow rapporteur for Hungary, which has, of course, always been the model country, the country that, as long ago as August 1989, helped to cut through the Iron Curtain, to break down the Wall. With the pan-European picnic in August 1989, when everything was hanging in the balance, Hungary sent Europe a vital signal, and they have always done very well in fulfilling the criteria, so that they could actually be an example to the others. I am therefore particularly amazed that the Hungarian prime minister has come up with this curious proposal that candidates should stand on a sort of Unity List, with seats shared out between the government and the opposition, and that this would be the way to enter the new Europe. That really is an old way of thinking. Not a few Heads of State or Government would like to have things split half and half between government and opposition; perhaps the German Chancellor would in his present situation. The only thing is that democracy is about competition; it is about grappling with problems in order to find the right solutions, and so I wish that Péter Medgyessy, the Hungarian prime minister, would drop this idea and get back to our way of conducting parliamentary debate and, in his internal affairs policies, to competition between parties."@en1
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