Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-05-05-Speech-3-415"
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"en.20100505.74.3-415"2
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"Madam President, I am delighted to be tackling a subject that is of the utmost importance to the Council and the Spanish Presidency, which is the Europe 2020 strategy for growth and quality employment.
Firstly, the structure of the Europe 2020 strategy has some integrated guidelines. The Commission has just put forward its proposal on the focus for these integrated guidelines – the Spanish Presidency has committed to working in all the Council’s relevant areas of action so that the Economic and Financial Affairs Council and the Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs Council can inform the European Council in June – and also the employment guidelines that require a European Parliament opinion.
Secondly, we have the main targets, which I referred to before.
Thirdly, there is something new in the new strategy: the national objectives. Every Member State must set its national targets, but they naturally need to be integrated into the European targets and supported by the Commission and the Council.
Fourthly, there has also been talk of what are described as the ‘bottlenecks’ that shape growth at national level. There is also something new in relation to the Lisbon Strategy: the Spanish Presidency is going to focus above all on those that affect the internal market.
Fifthly, there are the ‘flagship initiatives’ that are being developed by the Commission. We want the first of these to be realised during the Spanish Presidency: the Digital Agenda, which will be covered in the Transport, Telecommunications and Energy Council in May, after a communication that the Commission has undertaken to publish on 18 May.
To conclude, Madam President, I would also like to say that there are going to be specific debates on the new strategy in some of the formations of the Council, and that, as far as possible, we want those debates to be public, for example the next one in the Education, Youth and Culture Council next week.
I would like to emphasise that the work will of course not be finished in June. That is when the Europe 2020 strategy will be launched, but the work will not be finished then. It will have to be implemented and applied through the national reform programmes.
Finally, I would like to say that, from the point of view of the ‘governance’ of the strategy, the European Council will play an important role. (It has played an important role from the start, and it is an idea that has repeatedly been supported by both the Spanish Presidency and the President of the European Council, Mr Van Rompuy, who has played a very special role.) The European Council is going to play a very important role and undertake a very important task in developing and guiding this strategy, alongside the European Commission. They will be the two key institutions for implementing this strategy, which already has specific instruments that we all want to use.
As has already been said, we are emerging from the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and we must do everything we can to guarantee the recovery that we are beginning to see in the European Union, according to the forecasts presented by the Commission today, and at the same time, to mitigate the social consequences of the crisis.
However, as well as this short-term work that is being done by the Member States and the European institutions, we need to look beyond this decade and ensure the sustainability of our social model, the European social model. This is the dual challenge contained in the Europe 2020 strategy.
It is about not returning to a crisis that has not yet completely come to an end, and it is above all about doing so by establishing a strategy for growth, a model for growth that is adapted to the new times. It also needs to be a strategy for growth that is feasible and enforceable, and represents the European Union’s major political and economic commitment for the next few years.
As you are well aware, discussions on the Europe 2020 strategy began among the Heads of State or Government on an informal basis on 11 February. The strategy was then discussed in the European Council in March, and was also discussed in many of the formations of the Council being chaired by the Spanish Government during this six-month period.
In March, the European Council gave the go-ahead to the launch of the Europe 2020 strategy, which will take place definitively at the European Council in June, and established the elements, the structure and even the road map for the future development of the strategy.
The strategy is going to be focused on key issues for Europe: knowledge and innovation, the sustainable economy that the European Parliament was requesting, high employment, and social integration.
Of these five key targets, those that have been quantified are employment: 75% for men and women, investing 3% of GDP in research and development and the ‘20/20/20 targets’ for combating climate change. The target for decreasing the education drop-out rate and increasing the proportion of the population with higher education has not yet been quantified, nor has the target been set for promoting social integration, and in particular reducing poverty.
All of this is on the basis of the communication adopted by the Commission, which was a determining factor in the subsequent decision and the conclusions adopted at the March European Council."@en1
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