Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-10-23-Speech-2-086-000"
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"en.20121023.5.2-086-000"2
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".
Mr President, President of the Commission, President-in-Office of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, I am, by nature, an optimistic person. My optimism is realistic, however. It is based on concrete elements, on facts and accomplishments, and on experience of everything we have achieved in the past 60 years, which, in the end, is just a start.
For 60 years, Europe has set an example in the world. Our role tomorrow is to strengthen the social market economy, increase our solidarity, continue to defend human rights and, above all, spread our values throughout Europe and beyond.
President-in-Office of the Council, as I have said often here in this House, in times of crisis we need to take decisions. When we take decisions, it is inevitable that we will make some mistakes, but the worst thing to do in a crisis is to wait for too long. If we wait for too long, we will eventually cost our fellow citizens billions of euros.
That is my appeal to you, and I hope that we will see a very good European budget before the end of the year. That will be proof of our commitment for the outside world and the markets.
I wish you the very best of luck; I hope that you have the determination to reach your goal and bring us a nice Christmas present at our December part-session.
The Nobel Prize awarded to the European Union is recognition of what we have built together over 60 years. However, it is also encouragement to go further, and I believe in Europe. I believe in the Community method. I believe in the added value that the European Union offers through its common policies. I also believe, however, in the European investment that allows our budget to inject some EUR 100 billion into our economies every year, and it is by no means enough.
Europe needs these ambitious policies, policies that are going to help us to restore growth, but to implement them, we need an ambitious budget. I think that the debate here has clearly demonstrated that. I therefore appeal to everyone to face up to their responsibilities. We need a financial framework that matches our ambitions and, above all, we need an agreement at the end of the year if we want to appear credible to the outside world, Mr President.
Last week’s European Council took a further step towards achieving our economic union. Our crisis is an economic crisis, but our mistake has been to fail to meet our commitments and comply with the rules that we set ourselves. In recent months, we have faced up to our responsibilities here, in this Parliament, and we have introduced the necessary instruments.
The ‘economic governance’ package now has force of law but it has to be applied. The same goes for the ‘two-pack’ that we are discussing today. I think that we are going to conclude that very soon.
Ladies and gentlemen, one of the lessons of this crisis is that we cannot exclude certain sectors, such as the banking sector, from our common laws. My group is aware of that, which is why we support the Council’s proposal to establish a European bank supervisor. In our economy, everything is connected. The slightest failure, the collapse of a single bank, affects the entire system. The banks may think that they are too big to fail, but no bank is too small to be supervised. We are convinced of this: our citizens, our businesses and the banks themselves need to have confidence in our financial system.
We in the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) will make every effort to ensure that Europe emerges stronger from this crisis and that our European Union is reinforced because we believe that Europe is the solution.
For some 20 years, the single market has been our success, but for that success to last, we must complete it and finish our work. We must force the Heads of State or Government to quickly fill in the gaps in the single market. I am thinking, in particular, about the establishment of the digital single market. If we do not do this, we will lose a turnover of EUR 1 billion every year.
Ladies and gentlemen, Europe is at a crossroads. Some people want to do away with some of the European Union’s competences and reduce Europe to an economic free trade area. Europe is much more than that, however. Since the signature of the Treaty of Rome by our founding fathers, the European project has been synonymous with peace and prosperity. That has now been rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize."@en1
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