Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-03-13-Speech-2-017"
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"en.20070313.6.2-017"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, when discussing your paper, our group took the view that the Commission has found the right course and is pursuing that course with great confidence, sticking to the areas of policy that it defined at the start of its work, and that it is taking them forward in a way that gives the impression that it is acting with conviction. That comes out in the very first sentence of your work programme, where you say that the policy areas in which the Commission is to be active will meet with broad agreement. We welcome that. We welcome this self-confidence and we also welcome the fact that the Commission has found a clear course. We still want stronger leadership, however. And to stay with the image of a course, we would like you to sail more strongly with the wind, so that you will go faster.
That was early praise, so to speak, but in essence we are saying that this is a good programme; in our opinion, however, it is not enough for the situation in which Europe now finds itself. What we are missing above all is a clear word about Europe’s future. In the 24 page working paper you devote all of three lines to Europe’s future, but the question of where we are heading, what our common ‘progress’ should look like, is not answered, and this strategy for a work programme does not even attempt an answer.
That we are all working together for Europe is not taken for granted as much as this paper suggests. As Mr Nassauer has already said, it is unfortunately not accepted by the public as much as we would like. That is why it is important that the Commission sets the direction here. We want the Commission to spearhead the movement, demanding clear instructions as to where the European future is actually to go.
Your strategy is to supply results. We think that is good. Results are fine for showing the areas in which we are in fact visibly active. Only again and again we have the problem that national politicians, mostly from governments, take the credit for successes, while Europe has to take the blame for failures or unpleasant consequences. The Council’s good results are the most recent example. In Germany, at least, these good results are being credited to Mrs Merkel and the groundwork done by the Commission and European Parliament is not noticed at all. To that extent, the strategy of delivering results is a very ambivalent strategy.
Moreover, for all the welcome initiatives you present there are some that make us wonder what the grounds are for your satisfaction. You speak, for example, of a renewed consensus on enlargement. We cannot see that. You also want a common central database for fingerprints. There is no consensus for that either. It surprises us, especially in the light of the fact that, at the start of his term of office, Commission President Barroso styled himself a champion of civil rights. Such a database is the opposite of what he announced at the start of his term of office.
My colleagues will speak further about the various areas of policy. I would just like to mention one fundamental structural point that we have always raised in past debates. For the sake of being closer to the citizens and of making this document easier to handle, we would like you to say precisely what are legislative initiatives, what has nothing to do with legislation, what are new initiatives and what are follow-up measures, so that we really know what concrete steps we can expect in the coming year.
Of course we would like the citizens to be involved. The Commission is keen on communication. We believe that is right. The more interactive that can be, the better. If, for greater visibility for the policy of results, we can have these debates on strategy not only in the European Parliament, but also in the national parliaments, that would be an important step towards making clear where which policy comes from in the common Europe."@en1
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