Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-11-13-Speech-2-276"
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"en.20071113.31.2-276"2
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"Madam President, Madam Vice-President of the Commission, President-in-Office, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, the new Lisbon Treaty is the guiding vision for parliamentary democracy at EU level. For parliamentary democracy, you need political parties. You need political parties to represent the interests of society and offer citizens a variety of candidates and manifestos to choose from at elections. In all our 27 Member States, we have parties which stand in the national elections; what we need to do now is to enable these European parties to perform their democratic work at the European level as well.
We want to ensure that in advance of the European elections too, there is a range of active political families for our citizens to choose from, which are capable of mobilising the electorate and telling voters where they are planning to take them. We want citizens to be able to decide on the nature of the Europe that they are voting for and give them a real choice. The first Regulation on the statute and financing of European political parties, which we adopted back in 2004, was a resounding success. We now have ten political families which have registered, and this demonstrates the breadth of the political spectrum in the European Union. This revision of the Regulation is now designed to inject some flexibility into these democratic structures and expand them at the same time.
In most of our countries, we have not only political parties but also political foundations. These are vehicles for deeper analyses of social trends and are also a forum for debate which extends beyond the party membership. These foundations have proved their worth in many countries. They do good work and so it is all the more necessary to create the opportunity to conduct this debate, this discourse, about Europe at European level too, across national borders. I therefore welcome the fact that this instrument, which is additional to the political parties themselves, has also received Council's blessing.
Ladies and gentlemen, no political party's agenda is built around the financial year. It responds to political events, and so political parties must be treated differently from other associations. That is the purpose of this new Regulation: to inject some flexibility into financial management. We have three objectives here: firstly, we want the possibility of extending the financial year by three months on the expenditure side to enable parties to respond to political events. Secondly, we do not want parties to have to spend all their cash at the end of the year. We would like them to be able to use their own resources, membership contributions and donations to accumulate reserves which can be spent in response to key events in politics and especially, of course, on the European elections.
Finally, in order to assist the smaller political families in particular but also to get the European political foundations up and running, we need different arrangements regarding the proportion of grants and own resources. We envisage setting own resources at 15% and subsidies at 85% in the new Regulation.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Council has decided to divide the legal basis. We argued that this was not necessary. Unfortunately, this will result in a loss of transparency, because citizens will now need to look in two places for the legal basis for this new Regulation. However, we do not wish to prolong the disagreement over legal issues. That would simply drag out the process and distract attention from the real objective of this Regulation. In the interests of the European political parties and their preparations for the 2009 European election campaign, we ought to concentrate on issues of substance and conclude this matter before the end of the year. I am very pleased to hear that the substance of this Regulation has met with widespread agreement. I think we should now do everything possible in order to wrap up this important piece of legislation under the Portuguese Presidency so that we have a legal basis for political foundations and a basis for more flexible financial management in the 2008 budget year. Transitional arrangements for this will be required from the Council, as we originally proposed in the Committee on Constitutional Affairs.
Madam Vice-President of the Commission, I would like to thank you for taking the initiative on behalf of the Commission. I am grateful, too, to the Portuguese Presidency for its genuine commitment to this issue, and to Mr Leitão, with whom I did a great deal of work. I would also like to thank the Committee on Budgets and the Committee on Budgetary Control, Mrs Guy-Quint and Mrs Mathieu, for their valuable input in their reports, which introduces more transparency and more control over the allocation of these resources. We are well on track, and I hope we will get a result by the end of the year."@en1
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