Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-07-22-Speech-4-007"
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"en.20040722.1.4-007"2
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"Mr President, Mr Barroso, allow me firstly to congratulate you on your nomination to the post of future President of the European Commission, and allow me also to make a few comments on three points I believe to be important. Firstly, on the role of the Commission and the appointment of its President, secondly, on the common foreign and security policy and, thirdly, on diversity, subsidiarity and shared sovereignties in the European Union.
Firstly, the role of the Commission and the appointment of its President. For the moment, you have been nominated by the Heads of Government, by the European Council, and it falls to this Parliament, to this House, to approve your nomination, which will finally be ratified, together with that of the other members of the Commission, by the Governments of the Member States. With the new Constitutional Treaty, which will enter into force during these five years of your coming term in office, and also that of this Parliament, this issue is going to change, and it will be the European Council which, taking account of the result of the elections, will propose to Parliament the candidate to be elected President of the Commission, who will then be elected by the European Parliament. I believe this to be a step forward, although I do not yet consider it to be a decisive step. I would like to ask you, Mr Barroso, whether you believe that, with the new Constitutional Treaty, the Commission is really going to become a genuine executive government for the Union; whether you believe that, when the citizens vote in the elections to the European Parliament, they are truly going to feel that their vote is decisive and that with it they are going to be electing a President who will govern the Union over the coming years. We have had an entirely negative experience, because turnout has been extremely low. I believe this is because the citizens have not felt that their vote would achieve this.
Secondly, you hosted the meeting in the Azores which determined the invasion and war in Iraq. I would like to ask you whether, in your new post, if a similar situation arose, you would allow individual Member States of the European Union to take a similar decision without having first consulted the Council, without there previously being a common position amongst all the Member States of the European Union.
And thirdly, with regard to diversity, this Constitutional Treaty talks about the powers of the European institutions and also of the state institutions. It talks about the Union's exclusive competences and about shared competences, but there is real diversity within the Union which has not been considered: the stateless nations and the constitutional regions, which have competences which the central governments of the States cannot decide upon. What do you intend to do during your mandate to genuinely integrate the Union's true cultural and institutional diversity into the European Union?"@en1
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