Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-05-16-Speech-2-016"
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"en.20060516.4.2-016"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner Wallström, ladies and gentlemen, the Commission and a significant proportion of this Parliament have really distanced themselves from the citizens of Europe. The people do not just want to understand better what is going on in the institutions – they want greater participation. They want to be asked what they want, they want to make decisions, they want to be involved in the discussions on the future of Europe, and they want that to be taken into account.
I therefore have a rather different conception of the term 'listening' of which Mr Barroso is so fond. Precisely in this respect we need to make changes, so that we can ultimately have a real discussion on the future of the European Union. On his scores of trips, the President should not have just preached, but actually listened. All of those involved could have heard, from many people, quite specific conceptions of what the European Union should look like in the future.
A few days after the European Social Forum in Athens, the European Commission held a press conference to present their initiative for a Citizens' Agenda. However, if you expected any reference to the discussions during the European Social Forum, in which 35 000 people participated, you would have been disappointed. The members of my group take this forum seriously, though, and both before and during the forum they were involved in the discussions regarding a European appeal – Europe gives the citizens their say – and regarding the Charter of Principles for a Different Europe. This refutes all those insinuations that the Left within the European Union is not prepared to join in discussions on the future of the EU or on the Constitution.
I share the ideas used as starting points in both papers. We need to have a truly democratic debate on the future of Europe and the path we are going to take, and this debate must be based on the assumption that the dignity of every person must be sacrosanct and must be respected and protected. In my opinion, it is therefore quite grotesque for the President of the European Commission to state, as he did on 10 May 2006, that we must deliver results for Europe through a citizens' agenda.
Today we adopted our proposal for a citizens' agenda; the communication proposes 11 initiatives relating primarily to the internal market. President Barroso is remaining particularly loyal to that topic. He is sticking by his basic conviction that the objective of the European Union must be to remain competitive as a whole in the global market. However, that will never result in a true social Europe of solidarity with social cohesion at the forefront, and that is what the citizens of Europe are so critical about. That is the path they do not want to be taken down. They want different priorities to be set, and I think it is time for this to be taken into account. That is what we need to discuss within the European Union, in the context of the constitutional process and the discussion on Plan D."@en1
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