Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-10-13-Speech-3-024"
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"en.20041013.3.3-024"2
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"Mr President, Mr President of the Commission, on behalf of my group, I want to thank you for the work you, together with your whole Commission, have done for the European Union over the past five years. Both the President of this House and Mr Poettering have already listed a number of milestones of your term of office. You took office at a difficult time; relations between Parliament and the Commission were strained in the aftermath of the fall of the Commission headed by Jacques Santer. You achieved
and did it by meeting Parliament halfway, by the way in which you in your personal conduct as President of the Commission, and also that of all your Commission, made apparent the respect that you, within the interinstitutional framework, had for this House as the representative body for Europe’s peoples. For that we are grateful to you, for you have thereby set down a milestone in the history of the European Union. Your successor will be measured by the standard you have set in your dealings with this House. Anyone who wants, as President of the Commission, to enjoy the confidence of this House, cannot do less than Romano Prodi has done.
There is something else, Mr President of the Commission, of which you can be proud and for which we are grateful to you. In a very difficult period for Europe’s European and international policy, you took up a position to which I want again to make reference. Here, in this House, President Prodi declared that the use of arms must always and only be the policy of last resort, that recourse may be had to arms only when all the alternatives and all the policy instruments have been exhausted, and that the United Nations is the only forum in which such decisions may legitimately be taken. He affirmed that the consequences of warfare would be disastrous and incalculable. That was a visionary speech that you made that day. As far as the ‘wrong war’ against Iraq is concerned, you, as President of the European Commission, came to the right conclusions, and that I say with gratitude on behalf of our group as a whole.
Reference has been made to the introduction of the euro. Your campaign, and that by your Commissioners, for the Constitution – a campaign that is still going on, for it may be signed in Rome on 29 October, but this will not mean that it has been ratified – this campaign was a cause you stood up for. When it came to enlargement, too, you and Commissioner Verheugen, whom I want to mention, worked in an exemplary manner. I believe that, when things are weighed in the balance, Romano Prodi can look back with pride on a term of office, in which, as always, there were high and low points that we do not wish to gloss over. We Socialists, too, have from time to time had cause to voice criticisms, and when I compare Mr Poettering’s speech at the beginning of your term of office with the one he delivered today, the euphoria has ebbed away a bit over the five years, but that is a fact of political life.
Mr Prodi, you are now going back to Italy, and you have as yet taken no final decisions as to what you want to do there and actually will do there. Let me tell you, though, on behalf of the Socialist Group, that, whatever you decide – and I hope you will make the right decision – the Socialist Group in the European Parliament is alongside you in that decision, not only in mind and heart, but also with political will. Many, many thanks for the cooperation over the past five years."@en1
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