Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-07-21-Speech-3-122"
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"en.20040721.6.3-122"2
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"Mr President, I too congratulate you on your election as a Vice-President of this Parliament. Mr Barroso, you are a candidate for the position of President of the Commission, and, should you take up that position, your presidency does of course come at a very tricky time. At the European elections, over half the voters stayed at home, and some of those who did go to the polls voted for parties that are critical of Europe or hostile to it. What the voters are telling us, telling Parliament, the Council and the Commission, is that things cannot go on any longer the way they are. The European Union cannot go on if it keeps on working the way it does now. There is a massive crisis of confidence, and the last thing we can allow ourselves is to pass to the order of the day. It is also for those reasons that we have so many criticisms of the procedure that has been adopted. That has absolutely nothing to do with you personally – on the contrary, what speaks in your favour is the unanimous support you have gained – but the procedure is not consistent with the image that we in Europe must portray. In this, you are not the problem, but you could turn out to be the solution. You could well, indeed, concede that things cannot go on the way they are, and that we have to find another way of doing our work. We have to present a different image to the one we are currently showing the outside world. The question is whether you will carry on in the same way. I might add, by the way, that I am assuming you are not, partly on the basis of what you said earlier, but will you be carrying on with the backroom deals, with decisions taken by ministers in ‘old boy network’ style, or will you, like the public, say, ‘it cannot, indeed, go on this way’?
A second question is whether we should rely on your words or your actions. In what you say, there is now ‘something for everyone’, and I can well imagine that playing well for a candidate. I have great respect for your actions; the sort of economic policy you operate – or operated – in Portugal is the sort that the EU needs. I differ from the previous speaker in believing that your foreign policy is outstanding; these are things that we have need of. I hope that your deeds are more to be relied on than your words.
Yet another question by way of conclusion: you talked about getting more women into the Commission, and I see that as a very good line to take. What interests me primarily, as a Dutch liberal, is what you do when a country has a good woman candidate; do you then tell the Member State that it has to be the woman, that they may perhaps have perfectly good male candidates, but the woman must get the job? Will you push this through, even when the country in question currently occupies the presidency of the Union?"@en1
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