Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-03-14-Speech-3-419-000"
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"en.20120314.25.3-419-000"2
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"Mr President, Minister, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to address my words expressly to Mr Swoboda. Your first motion for a resolution was pleasantly balanced and specifically unemotional with regard to what can be said following the presidential elections. In signing the European Convention on Human Rights, the Russian leadership made a voluntary commitment that it is not fulfilling. These elections, too, were once again not fair or free of fraud. Even a EUR 300 million investment in surveillance technology by the government did not solve a problem that can only be solved at a political level. These are the sober facts that do not leave us, as a partner, indifferent. They also highlight the contradictory nature of a Russian society, which, as everyone can see, is nevertheless changing. This is something we should welcome and support, because emerging democracies thrive on efforts to develop and change, and also on protests. Russia is becoming normal.
I therefore consider a number of the conclusions drawn by some of my colleagues here in Parliament to be politically wrong. There must be no compromises in the text here, either. This House must finally decide what line it wants to take. At the ‘Russia after the Elections’ event yesterday, organised by the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, I discovered that some Members are of the opinion that Russia is no longer normal. Was it ever normal? They believe it represents a potential danger and that we cannot simply carry on as before, but must now finally take a different course.
I would just like to say something about this. Those who want to think in terms of escalation spirals should now explain how far they want to go with this and, moreover, not only in terms of where that leaves our partnership. For all the justified criticism and all of the differences, partnership for me means, above all, a balance in terms of our common interests, and, at least in my mother tongue, partnership and subordination are not synonyms. People who advocate this path are also saying, as far as I can see, that they do not believe in the power of society to change and that they have not taken note of the changes in Russian society, to which, incidentally, the reports of the election observers from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) and the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) also refer, as here is where alternatives to the Putin-steered democracy are being sought. All of this must, ultimately, be discussed in political terms.
The dynamism that some people are currently developing here in this House following the elections is something that I consider to be disconcerting, however. In my view, it cannot be reconciled with the political dignity and self-perception of a House that stands for plurality in Europe if representatives of part of the Russian opposition here in Strasbourg were able, unchallenged, to discredit the alternative presidential candidates by describing them simply as ‘Putin’s pigs’, when these candidates, without rectification of the election fraud, received the vote of more than 25 million citizens in Russia. Despite knowledge to the contrary, these same people have been speaking for weeks in this House, likewise unchallenged, of the possible bloodshed caused by Mr Putin and of potential revolutions.
All I can say is that it is not the clear majority in this House that is deliberately taking the wrong course in its criticism of the elections in Russia."@en1
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