Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-12-16-Speech-2-191"
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, you ended your speech, Mr Sarkozy, by saying that you had tried to make Europe move but that Europe had changed you. You are not the only one.
I would like to add that the first reading agreement is an exception. As a Parliament we will not allow the next Council to say to us: ‘You did this for the climate change and energy package’. If you have made it clear that the first reading was a means of applying pressure on obstinate Heads of State or Government to make them see reason, then that is a good thing in this case. However, it should not become a precedent in all other cases.
You have acted correctly in the financial crisis. However, let me remind you what my colleague Poul Nyrup Rasmussen and I said here during the debate in July at the beginning of your Presidency. We said that the social imbalances in Europe resulting from the unfair distribution of profits and the unfair distribution of wealth in Europe are a ticking time bomb. The response of the French Presidency was: ‘That is not our top priority’. Over the course of the last six months it has become clear to you that it is a top priority. You have acted correctly, but if you had acted earlier, it would have been possible to prevent many of the things from happening which now need to be resolved. Well done, but perhaps slightly too late.
We do not have the Treaty of Lisbon and now we have heard the Council’s decision. We have to live with this and we have to accept it. However, all the decisions that you have made on the Commission, on the seats in Parliament, on the concessions to the people of Ireland will be of no use unless a prime minister or a government of Ireland takes the bull by the horns and tells the citizens of Ireland: ‘Look what has happened! Look at the solidarity of the Europeans, of the European States with Ireland and imagine what would have happened if Ireland had been facing this financial crisis alone!’ If the Irish prime minister does not tell his people: ‘Now you must work together in solidarity with the Europeans in your own interest!’, then it will all come to nothing again. We can hand over the entire European project to these people, to Mr Ganley and his machinations. We need a bold Irish government that does not negotiate a set of half-baked compromises, but that says: ‘We want Europe and we want this treaty!’
The French Presidency was a success. I would like to congratulate you in particular on the fact that you have come out as a pro-European by saying: ‘I stand by this European project’. In the past I sometimes had my doubts. I am familiar with many of your speeches. As President you have shown that you have stuck by what you said at the beginning. If the next Presidency does the same, I will be happy. Thank you very much! You have done a lot of good things and some things that are not as good, but we will forget those today. Overall, I believe that the French Presidency has taken Europe forward and that is what it was all about. It was not just about France, but about Europe as a whole and the overall result is good. Thank you very much!
The French Presidency has also changed others, such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit. When we left the Élysée Palace last week, after our meeting there, you provided us with a police escort with flashing lights, and I was in a car with Mr Cohn-Bendit behind the police. I said to him ‘Look how times have changed! In 1968, it was the police who were chasing after you, and now it is you who are chasing around Paris behind the police’.
Times have changed, and the French Presidency has also changed a lot of things.
Mr President, last week the German weekly newspaper
published a portrait of you entitled ‘The Omnipresident’. It is true that you are somewhat omnipresent: one day you are in Paris, the next in Brussels, today in Strasbourg, tomorrow in London, even if Mrs Merkel was not invited. It is not up to me to assess your actions in Paris, because it is not up to me to discuss social imbalances or media policy: that is for my counterparts in Paris to discuss.
It is, however, up to me to discuss, to talk about and to assess your Presidency of the European Union, and the assessment is not bad at all.
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I believe that the French Presidency has produced positive results. The climate change and energy package is a major success. I am grateful that you have paid the European Parliament the tribute that it deserves, because without the Parliament the package would not have been successful. I would also like to thank specifically our rapporteurs. In contrast to the Commission with its 22 000 officials and the major government bodies which you have at your disposal, our rapporteurs have only three, four or five employees. The quality of the work they produce is first-class, because it comes from the European Parliament. It is good that you have acknowledged this.
Let us take the example of the Directive on CO
labelling of cars. It contains a lot of work by Mr Sacconi and just a hint of Mr Sarkozy, but overall it is a major success. It is a success for my group, because the Socialist Group in the European Parliament has made a great effort to ensure that there is a balance between the economic necessities which we cannot ignore and the environmental obligations which we must all face up to. I believe that the criticism which we have heard in particular from the areas that you have described indicates that we are on the right track. For this reason, our group will vote unanimously in favour of this package. I hope, dear Joseph, that the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats will do the same! Or should we be concerned that an amendment will be submitted to postpone the emissions trading scheme? Over the last few days, we have gained a better understanding of what PPE-DE means. PPE is easy to translate, but DE seems to us to stand for European confusion. You should decide what you want to do. Do you want to praise Mr Sarkozy, but not support him, or do you want to adopt this package together with us? We await with interest the PPE-DE Group’s vote."@en1
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