Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-10-26-Speech-3-066-000"
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"en.20111026.3.3-066-000"2
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"Mr President, I have listened with great interest to the debate which has just taken place on Parliament’s priorities and the approach to negotiating the EU budget for 2012. I would like to say sincerely that much of what has been said has encouraged me. I have the impression that we are all beginning to understand the need to depart from the traditional way of approving the budget, which – I remember it this way, at least – has been more or less the same for over a decade: the Council presented its draft, Parliament increased all the budget lines to more or less the same extent and we came together somewhere in between. We were all happy with this.
Times have changed. We have a crisis, and no one in the Chamber can deny it. We have to look at the EU budget in a different way. The EU budget – as Mr Lewandowski has also pointed out – must grow and is growing. It is not a budget which is getting smaller, and we now have to agree on a scale of growth which is acceptable to all of us. We cannot continue to proceed according to the same formula. We are in a crisis and we have to choose our priorities. We have to specify what in fact the Union most needs at the moment and where we have to allocate funds, and we have to do exactly the same work as is being done by all the Member States. They have their budgets, they have limited resources and they have to choose what in fact needs to be funded in this situation, and they have to determine the level of payments necessary to meet those expenditures.
We have to remember that the times are uncertain. We do not know what will happen in a few months’ time. Therefore, I am greatly worried by the move in the European Parliament towards using all the margins already – you are even using the flexibility mechanisms. If something unexpected happens next year, we will not have any resources from which to draw additional funds for this purpose. In my opinion, the practice – which unfortunately has become a permanent one during this financial perspective – is that almost every year we renegotiate the Multiannual Financial Framework, and this is not a good thing. This was not the purpose of the exercise we carried out many years ago. At the time, we agreed maximum levels of expenditure and we all treated this very seriously. Resources were shared out, taking a variety of criteria into account. We cannot negotiate everything every year and enter into negotiations on the financial perspective every time. As a matter of fact, in this situation we do not have to sit down to these negotiations now, because in any case they do not have any great significance.
We have to think about how to secure the Union and the Union budget for the future, particularly in uncertain times. We also have to rebuild the credibility of the European institutions. We must not allow discussions between the two institutions to be carried on which are long and completely incomprehensible to those outside – we will all be explaining to those outside that we are acting in the interests of the citizens, but in fact no one knows what the problem involves. At the moment the Union has to regain credibility. The EU institutions have to demonstrate that they are able to reach agreement by the prescribed deadline and produce solutions which are good for everyone.
We must not forget about one very important thing – about the fact that the present crisis and the discussion which will take place today in the European Council will concern the excessive debt in the European Union. This means that the European Union has spent too much in previous years. The Member States have spent too much money. This in turn shows something else: pouring money in as a remedy to every problem that arises is not a good solution. Sometimes it is necessary to sit down and consider if the money we are putting in really is helping to solve a specific problem. This is in fact the moment we face now. We all have to sit down and think, knowing what our priorities are. The Council is not questioning the European Union’s priorities. It is only asking that we sit down and talk reasonably together about what we can in fact afford with the limited funds we have available.
Finally, I would like to mention one more important thing. We often say we want to help particular Member States, to give them additional funds to stimulate their economies. Let us remember that these funds come from their budgets. They first have to find these additional funds, which later come back to them, and this is sometimes very difficult. I know from the budget of the country from which I come that every extra PLN 1 billion allocated to the EU budget is a decision about a potential reduction of expenditure on other purposes or a reduction of expenditure on cofinancing. We now therefore have to find a balance between what we will leave in the national budgets for cofinancing, and what we will transfer to the EU budget to help those countries."@en1
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