Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-07-06-Speech-2-015"
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"en.20100706.4.2-015"2
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"Mr President, if football does not count, I, too, shall now make a footballing analogy. The Spanish Presidency seems to me a little like Fernando Torres’s World Cup. It began with high expectations, but hitherto, it has been a rather disappointing tournament. I hope in all honesty that as far as Fernando Torres is concerned, it will be the same tomorrow, and that we shall not have to relive the experience of 2008.
On economic policy, the Spanish Presidency set itself a truly ambitious programme: EU 2020, stricter equity capital requirements for banks, regulation of hedge funds and reform of European financial supervision. This was absolutely the correct approach in the crisis.
I must say, however, on behalf of my group, that we are disappointed with the result. Not so much with the Presidency of the Council as such, but with the Member States. We all know how diplomatic Mr Barroso is. When he says that there has been progress but no breakthrough, then for him, this is plain talking.
It is true that an agreement could be reached on the capital requirements, yet not on the regulation of hedge funds. Here, negotiations hit the buffers because no common position can be arrived at in the Council, although here too, there must be bargaining. There are also problems in the Council when it comes to financial supervision. Do the Member States really believe that in a common market for financial services, supervision should best be organised at a national level? The crisis has shown that this approach has failed. The Council should not stand in the way of efficient European financial supervision. The taxpayer is unable and unwilling to rescue the banking system one more time.
Much the same goes for the EU 2020 strategy. In the Council, they behave as if the Lisbon Strategy had not failed due to mistaken ideas. That is precisely the case, however. The open method of coordination broke down. Here, too, we need more European cooperation. A jobs and growth strategy aiming for success must be based on the Community method. The new strategy does not do this to a sufficient degree. This House has called for a different approach.
If we in Europe do not wish to settle for loss of prosperity in the long term, then we must become more competitive. For this purpose, we need an efficient growth strategy with potential for success. For this purpose, we need regulation and a reorientation of the financial markets, which focuses more strongly again on financing of the real economy. For this purpose, we need effective crisis prevention and crisis management in the form of a European financial supervision authority worthy of the name, and a European currency fund.
However, to this end, we also need Member States’ governments finally to put their budgets in order, and better coordination of our economic policy in Europe. This cannot be a race to the bottom, it must be a race to the top; we want more competitiveness in more Member States.
In foreign policy, more would surely have been achieved if Spain had recognised Kosovo. This weakened the position of the Council on this question from the very beginning. The US-EU summit and the meeting of the Union for the Mediterranean were cancelled.
There is one final comment I should like to make. My group has an extremely constructive approach to negotiations with Turkey, but to have opened a new chapter on the last day of the Presidency, almost as if it were a reward for Turkey’s abstention in the UN Security Council on sanctions against Iran, has attracted criticism even from supporters of Turkey. I believe that engagement with Turkey must be carried out differently, in a more differentiated and committed way, and in a better thought-out way, rather than rushing through decisions at the last minute."@en1
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