Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-10-26-Speech-2-028"
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"en.20041026.5.2-028"2
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"Mr President, Mr President-designate of the Commission, is it reasonable to bring down a Commission because two or three Commissioners are not entirely satisfactory? This presentation of the situation by the President-designate constitutes, as far as my group is concerned, a deeply flawed assessment of the crisis affecting the EU.
The recent mounting criticism of the Barroso team is nothing short of a clap of thunder in a calm sky. Let me remind you that a not inconsiderable section of this House had, as long ago as July, expressed its mistrust of the rather too liberal choices that characterise Mr Barroso. It cannot be a surprise to anyone that the college of Commissioners presented to us only serves to exacerbate all of these reservations. By putting in the highly sensitive competition post an ardent devotee of market economics, as one analyst put it, an industrial lobbyist who represents and fosters dubious relations between public responsibilities and private interests, to the point of having been severely and unanimously reprimanded by his national parliament; by naming in the post of international trade a champion of free trade, who has no compunction about announcing that he puts his faith in competition to improve the performance of public services; by giving the internal market portfolio to a fundamentalist of liberalism, that of the environment to a conservative, for whom ecology appears to be the least of his concerns, and that of agriculture to a champion of the agricultural business, and so on and so forth, the President-designate has no doubt succeeded in convincing a number of doubters that he nurtured a particular idea of Europe that they certainly did not share.
Against the backdrop of this fundamental challenge to Mr Barroso’s economic, social and environmental choices, the Buttiglione bomb has gone off. Mr Barroso told us that he set great store by communication. He has got what he wanted. One single Commissioner has brought fame to the whole of his Commission, albeit at a considerable price. The image of his team, whatever may have been the quality of some of its members, is forever tarnished with unworthy and anachronistic words that were not punished as they should have been. If a candidate country displayed such fundamentalist beliefs on the place of women in society, and such discriminatory beliefs on homosexuality, it would be rejected. At the very least, we should have done likewise with a European Commissioner.
Let me add that other statements made by Mr Buttiglione are also worthy of our attention, even if, or rather, all the more so, because the Council and the Commission have among their ranks a number of sympathisers with these dangerous ideas. One such idea is to set up camps for migrants and asylum seekers in North Africa, on the subject of which Mr Buttiglione felt the need to clarify that they would not be, and I quote, ‘concentration camps at all, but humanitarian centres’. Thank you for clearing that up. A further example is the bellicose view of the fight against terrorism that Mr Buttiglione has trotted out: our society is afraid, we are at war, we will win. This is the message drummed out by the Commissioner-designate, picking up an old refrain dear to the current incumbent of the White House.
It is these elements that should influence our decision tomorrow. Never, in the 25 years that I have seen colleges of Commissioners come and go, have I seen such an unloved Commission before it has even taken up its duties. In fact, I firmly believe that, following the failure of the Santer Commission, then the stormy journey taken by the one that succeeded it, following the succession of increasingly bitter disputes between governments and the Commission, between governments themselves, between the Commission and Parliament, following numerous worrying signs of ‘eurofatigue’ among the general public – to use an expression often heard in the new Member States – not least after the elections, which were notable for a record low turnout, and given the fact that the draft Constitution might not be ratified in a few days’ time, I firmly believe that the Barroso syndrome, which will tomorrow lead to an historic defeat or to a Pyrrhic victory, constitutes a new and powerful indicator of the deep crisis of a Europe without vision and without a unifying plan.
Clearly a root-and-branch review is needed to put some sense back into what could and should be one of the high adventures of our times. Accordingly, my group, in a unanimous decision on the part of its 17 members, will tomorrow vote against the appointment of the Barroso Commission."@en1
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