Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-11-17-Speech-3-168"
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"en.20041117.9.3-168"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance has considered it very important to fight for the European Parliament to make its own voice heard on an important issue: respect for a common European feeling in the matter of freedom and non-discrimination.
Now, please explain to us why you want to make Europe run this risk. Why, after having lived through the Santer crisis, the Eurostat polemics and the Buttiglione psychodrama, do you take responsibility for weakening your Commission to this level? It is true that you are not alone in sharing this responsibility: Messrs Shultz, Poettering and Watson have helped to shoulder it. They took fright at their great success on 27 October and wished to return to being an acquiescent Parliament.
That is not for us and the responsibility will not be ours if there is trouble. The responsibility for the future of your institution will lie with you, and with the groups who have offered sacrifices to contingent party interests and to counting how many Commissioners belong to their own political families.
In closing, Mr President, in our opinion the choice of Stavros Dimas for the environment is not by chance. It reflects the precise hierarchy of priorities in your Commission, where the environment is not to be found. Nevertheless, we are certainly ready to try a sort of charm offensive towards Commissioner Dimas and also to admit that we were wrong if he proves to have more energy and more competence.
Very quickly, Mr President, I should like to conclude by saying that not only is the composition of your Commission a problem but also the direction in which this Commission wishes to go. We shall try to act as an opposition in an absolutely constructive spirit, and we hope occasionally to convince you that our road is the correct one.
The choice of those – among whom I include you, Mr Pottering, Mr Watson – who cried sacrilege, an apocalyptic crisis over something so mundane as the demand to change a team that was not working, has proved to be mistaken. Contrary to what was thought, public opinion has understood and supported what happened here perfectly. This, it seems to me, is something that should be strongly emphasised. Nevertheless, my group has decided unanimously not to support your Commission.
The modifications that you have made are minimal, and even if they have cleared the field of the awkward presence of Rocco Buttiglione, they have not solved the more serious problems. Above all, they keep your Commission in an unacceptably weak and vulnerable position. It is true, Mr Watson, this Commission is better than the one we had on 27 October, but we could have had one that was better still.
We continue to regard it as an error, leaving aside his personal competence, for a Commissioner for Justice to be nominated who is a minister who has signed a farcical law on conflict of interest and who comes from a government led by a man, Silvio Berlusconi, for whom a sentence of eight years’ imprisonment for corruption has just been demanded.
Yet, alas, the Berlusconisation of Europe proceeds apace, and with your Commission conflict of interest becomes a European vice. It is precisely from the Netherlands, a country that is always ready to deliver grand lectures on morality, that there arises a case that we see as more problematic. Without wishing to underestimate the negative impact that Mrs Fischer Boel’s conflict of interest may have on the common agricultural policy, it is the clear that the case of Mrs Kroes represents the most dangerous landmine on the road to credibility for your Commission, Mr Barroso.
The ridiculous statistics produced by the Commission on the basis of invalid calculations cannot disguise the fact that if Mrs Kroes had been in Mr Monti’s post, she would have had to stand aside in no less than 35 cases. What is more, the statistics indicate that there are three cases at the moment on which the Commission will be a lame duck and will have little credibility: reform of the competition rules in the maritime transport sector, the investigations under way in the so-called ‘bitumen cartel’ (which is a particularly serious case because Mrs Kroes was until a few weeks ago a member of one of the businesses in question), and finally, the inquiry into a possible abuse of its dominant position by the British mobile telephone operator
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Competition – frankly, it is a little ridiculous that a ‘Green’ should bring this to Parliament’s attention when it and the Commission are full of liberals – represents one of the cornerstones of the Union’s credibility, and the responsible Commissioner must be above all suspicion."@en1
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