Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-05-22-Speech-2-202"
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"en.20070522.23.2-202"2
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".
Mr President, I should like to make three brief comments. The first does not concern Mr Prodi directly, but rather the famous twelve questions put by the Presidency-in-Office of the Council to the Heads of State or Government. One of them is worded as follows, and I quote: ‘What do you think of the proposal (...) to change the terminology without changing the legal substance, for example, regarding the name of the Treaty?’ How do you expect any citizen, upon reading that, not to say to himself that the European leaders are taking him for a complete fool, to put it mildly?
More fundamentally, Mr Prodi emphasised just now that European electors have to know what the role of the European Parliament will be, if there will or will not be a stable Presidency of the European Council and a European foreign minister, and how the Commission will be constituted. All of these issues are indeed important. But do you not hear other, much stronger and more significant questions being asked around you, questions to which none of you ever reply? For example, even neo-liberal economists are asking where, in the current world context, a policy of unbridled free trade associated with free movement of capital and total freedom to relocate production facilities as well as total freedom of movement for foreign investors, including the most predatory ones, is in danger of leading us to. What changes do you propose to the Community acquis in this regard?
Other voices, and not the least important ones, are being raised against the tax wars that the Member States are waging, or in favour of a change to the statutes of the European Central Bank or yet again in favour of a controlled industrial policy in key sectors of the modern economy, outside the rules of free competition. What kind of break with the status quo do you consider desirable or acceptable from this point of view? Does Europe have to be about the marketplace or about politics in relation to the market? To what extent does democracy end where the reign of the open market economy or free competition begins? These questions are on the table. What do you think about them?
One last word to Mr Barroso, who is not here today, but who expressed his delight at what he considers the victory of the ‘yes’ vote during the French elections. This is a delusion. There is no doubt that the new French President supports the ‘yes’ vote. That is why he, like you, feared a new referendum. But the commitments he had to make on Europe in order to make acceptable his refusal to re-consult the citizens say a lot about the persisting depth of anti-liberal ambitions in that country. We will be able to remind him in particular of the keynote speech he made on this issue on 21 February right here in Strasbourg, entitled ‘I want Europe to change’. The real question is this: other than institutional innovations, what changes are you ready for?"@en1
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