Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-01-20-Speech-3-013"
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"en.20100120.3.3-013"2
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"Mr President, the Spanish Presidency has an ambitious programme, which you have described to us, Mr Zapatero. You mentioned the four major priorities of greater energy security, more investment in information technology, more education and training and the creation of a form of European economic governance that is to ensure that these priorities can also be implemented. That is the right approach and it will take Europe into a new phase.
The political re-energising that we need in Europe is tied in very strongly with our expectations of your Presidency, Mr Rodríguez Zapatero. I would therefore like to add that we also need more economic control in Europe. I will give you an example to illustrate the fact that social cohesion gets destroyed in society because there is not enough control or not enough courage to exert control.
When we talk about regulation of the financial markets and regulation of the banking system, we also need to mention the fact that the same banks that, a year ago, received hundreds of billions of euros in government money in order to ensure their survival, are not using this money today to give credit, but to speculate, using taxpayers’ money, in order to generate soaring profits. That is destroying people’s trust in the economic system. It is destroying social cohesion. The part of your programme that involves finally implementing the control of the financial markets is therefore an important element that we Socialists fully support.
The Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament will give its support to your Presidency, Mr Zapatero. I believe that what you have presented here is an approach that brings genuine reason for hope. I also hope that the Commission will act with the same intensity and the same political direction as your Presidency. We will do whatever we can to put the Commission on the right path in the next six months and beyond, because we hope that, as a result of the 18-month long triple-shared presidencies, there will not be a completely different programme every six months, but that we will instead have continuity.
Therefore, over the next six and the subsequent twelve months of this trio of presidencies, you will be able to count on the support of the Socialists and Democrats. So, I wish you good luck, Mr Zapatero.
The challenges faced by this continent are not to do with holding parliamentary sittings or arranging one summit after another. We have held many summits in the past. The summits do not solve the problems, they delineate them. What we need is for the solutions to the problems to actually be implemented in the Member States.
The reactions to your proposal for economic governance indicate that this is exactly where the problem lies. Where did the Lisbon strategy fail? It was not that it would not have been possible to implement it. No, it was possible to implement it. The Lisbon strategy failed due to the reluctance of the Member States to keep their own promises. This new approach, this breath of fresh air that you want to bring into European policy with this ambitious programme, is therefore the right one.
The old structures that we have had up to now remind me somewhat of Don Quixote’s beautiful horse, Rosinante, which thought it was a racehorse. In reality, it was an old nag. We will not make it into the 21st century on Rosinante. For this, we need new approaches and, therefore, you are on the right path.
What Europe needs is to adopt some aspects of the Spanish model. The reason why – and I am saying this only once – we as Socialists specifically support you is that we believe that your government in Spain is a forward-thinking government. You have succeeded, in the face of a lot of opposition and with a great deal of courage, in giving your country an enormous push towards modernisation. You have our greatest respect for that.
If you act at European level with the same energy and the same determination, you will also bring this modernisation drive to Europe. I think it is courageous for a Head of Government to say, for example, that marital violence is not a national problem but a problem that affects the whole of society everywhere and that we in Europe, in our highly developed, civilised society, must not regard violence against women as a minor offence, but as a violation of human rights, and that is what it is."@en1
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