Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-12-16-Speech-2-194"
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"Mr President, Mr Sarkozy, Mr Barroso, yes, we do appreciate your proactive approach, and yes, you have tried to make Europe move forward. The only thing is, we have had several Nicolases here, and for my part I was in favour of Nicolas the First, who declared to us in July 2008, in front of a stunned House, that ‘unanimity kills democracy’. That was what Nicolas the First said to the European Parliament in July 2008. Nicolas the First was right; Nicolas the Third is wrong.
Just one more thing to finish: as I have said, the environmental recovery plan is inadequate, because there is not enough in it. This is not just your fault, and it is not a European plan.
However, I would now like to say this. Last week, the prominent dissident Liu Xiaobo was arrested in Beijing. We have seen your policy concerning China: you have said to us in this House that we must avoid humiliating the Chinese. You have not humiliated the Chinese; it is the Chinese who have humiliated you. They have walked all over you. Afterwards, you told us ‘well, nobody can stop me seeing the Dalai Lama on the quiet in Gdańsk’. That is just not on! For my part, I am proud that this Parliament awarded the Sakharov Prize to a dissident, Hu Jia, and I am proud that we did not give in to what the Presidency wanted to do, namely to prostrate ourselves before the Chinese whilst they imprison and torture people on a daily basis and the European Union says nothing, just as it said nothing when Mr Putin arrested a crowd of demonstrators who were demanding nothing more than social equality. That is the policy: when VIPs are with us, we prostrate ourselves, and that is why we reject this policy when it is expressed in this way.
That is my problem with the French Presidency. It is a weather vane that, one minute, is saying something true and, the next minute, is saying something false, and looking back on it now, I will take everything that is true and leave everything that did not work to spin on the weather vane, because there is a difference between us.
You are reducing the European Parliament to Viagra for governments, but we are not here to be used to make others do what they do not want to do. Nobody here has said that we want to create a Europe against the nations. Nobody has said that. The Community institutions are, quite rightly, a Europe of the Nations and of the people, and we here represent the people. You want the Treaty of Lisbon to be ratified, and the possibilities for unanimity are precisely what the Treaty of Lisbon reduces, and why? Because unanimity kills democracy and, if we carry on like this, we will kill our ability to create European policy.
You are obviously right to say that presidents need to get experience, but Mrs Merkel, the climate chancellor, was President-in-Office here, and once she went back to just being the German Chancellor, she fell into the clutches of German industry and forgot about the European interest. That is what you were faced with in the European Council, and you had to reach a compromise between the various national egos: a compromise that we are going to judge, and that we are going to judge in a certain way. We will vote in favour of what is good and against what is bad, and we will not give in to blackmail.
That is right: I think that the first reading is blackmail, because a parliament’s democratic process is to take a proposal, to contradict it and to go back to the negotiating table. That is why, even on the climate change package, I for my part have some doubts regarding deals made at first reading.
Following on from that, I know that you like French
but, really, your Françoise Hardy lover’s duet of ‘
’, Mr Sarkozy and Mr Barroso, is fooling no one. It is certainly not fooling us, because what you have done is reduce the Commission to a secretariat for the Council. That is what Mr Barroso’s Commission has been good for, and that is all. Nothing else!
Yes, gentlemen, we will hold elections shortly, and we will talk about these subjects, about how you, on both sides, are grovelling to your governments. It is not our job, here in Parliament, to grovel to our national parties: our job is to defend European interests, Community interests, not national interests. That is what I wanted to say, both to the left and to the right.
On the climate change package, we were strong and we took the lead, and it is true that, even if it was not enough, as we were told at the time, the ‘3x20’ was just right. However, we have moved from ‘3x20’ to the legitimacy of the ‘4x4’ economy. That is where we have ended up following the climate change package, and why is that? I will tell you why: it is because, in the recovery plan, as you have designed it – and this is not your fault, I am not saying that – it is because there are some things that even you cannot do, Mr Sarkozy, and even you cannot manage!
For example, faced with German economic nationalism, you chickened out. You, you and Mr Barroso, said to us: ‘1.5% of GDP’, but in the end the whole world knows that Mr Obama’s plan amounts to 3% to 4% of GDP on environmental and economic recovery, and we will not manage that. Do you know what Mr Obama will say to you? He will say ‘no, you cannot, you are not able, it is not enough’, just like Mr Krugman said to Mr Steinbrück, and Mr Krugman has won the Nobel Prize in economics. If it were me saying this, you would say that I did not know what I was talking about, but it was Mr Krugman who said it."@en1
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"la main dans la main, et les yeux dans les yeux, ils s’en vont amoureux sans peur du lendemain"1
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