Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-03-22-Speech-3-219"
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"en.20060322.17.3-219"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I represent my honourable colleague Mr López-Istúriz White, who drafted the opinion of the Committee on Legal Affairs, and I shall make a few comments on that opinion on his behalf and on behalf of my group.
I agree with the view of the main rapporteur, Mr Leinen, that the existing statute must certainly be regarded in principle as a total success and that it was entirely right and proper for us to make a clear distinction between party funding and the financing of parliamentary groups. We also owed it to the public to make that amendment.
Political parties help to form the will of the people – in the European context, we should say ‘of the peoples’ – and that is why it is essential that the European institutions should establish the prerequisites and create the conditions for the proper functioning of these European parties. In this context, there are four things to which I attach particular importance.
Firstly, it is essential to create a sustainable permanent financial framework that enables parties to obtain long-term funding. The grants that are currently paid to the European parties do not provide an adequate basis for truly sustainable long-term planning of activities. Plans are tied at the present time to calendar years within the electoral term. Changes in party funding can also occur if new parties are created and the volume of funding then has to be adjusted. I am simply saying that the existing provisions do not let parties plan ahead with a sufficient degree of financial security and that, in these circumstances, changes are eminently desirable.
Secondly, we must allow European parties to create financial reserves that are not lost from one year to the next. Mr Leinen likewise addressed this subject, which also featured in our deliberations in the Committee on Legal Affairs. His reference to the notorious December rush hit the nail on the head. We want sustainable long-term planning of party funding; we do not want a situation in which, in the run-up to Christmas, so to speak, money is splashed about because of the pressure to ‘use it or lose it’.
In this context, it is also worth considering whether the 20% limit for transfers from one budgetary item to another should be rethought with a view to making it more flexible. European parties must have the freedom to respond to changing requirements that might stem, for example, from a crisis in the political arena by restructuring their resources more radically than the present statute permits.
Fourthly, against this background I believe that the statute for European political parties should be amended to enable the European parties to act more effectively for the benefit of the entire population and to perform their role as driving forces in the process of political decision-making. At the same time, however, I cannot deny that the parties could do more by their own efforts to achieve this aim of bringing Europe closer to the people and involving its citizens in what is happening here in Europe.
I personally do not believe that a European list of candidates, parallel to the national lists, would be a means of solving this problem. Party lists are an abstract concept, and seats are allocated to particular parties, and many people cannot identify with that. What we need is a far more personalised European electoral process, and there is a very simple way of doing that: if at least the two mass parties in Europe could each decide to campaign in the European elections with a chosen leader who would subsequently be their candidate for election as President of the Commission, the elections would become strongly personalised within a fairly short time, and people would identify far more closely with individual candidates and with political statements of intent, which alone could probably lead to a considerable increase in turnout at European elections.
I hope that the political parties will have the courage to take this step."@en1
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