Mr President, on behalf of my Group I would like to congratulate the rapporteur and to say that we support the report, just as we welcome the positive tone of the Commission’s communication. It is high time that we had a more efficient communications strategy and that cooperation between the Commission, the European Parliament and the Member States was improved in this new parliamentary term. The European public not only feels inadequately prepared for the euro, it also genuinely is inadequately prepared for it, both objectively and subjectively speaking. The fact is that the long transitional period has not led to more intensive and careful preparations being made for the introduction of the euro, quite the contrary – it has led to more disinformation and also to preparations being postponed, in some people’s minds even to June 2002. Unfortunately, this seems to apply not only to the public, but also to business. Although 80% of businesses say that they are preparing for the euro and its introduction, objectively speaking at most 25% are making concrete preparations. A sign of this is of course that only 1% of banknotes within the European Union have been converted to date. If we do not tackle this now, fears that we will end up with the dreaded ‘big bang’, which none of the governments wanted, will be totally justified. The governments themselves really must do some advance work, however, and demonstrate greater commitment. I believe that you cannot shift all the responsibility to the European institutions. After all, it is the EU Member States that have a duty to provide political information and education according to the principle of subsidiarity. We really must call on the Member States of the European Union to invest money, time and human resources in ensuring that the euro is a success. It is a matter of regret that up to now public administrations have not led the way as they should have done. I think it is also important, and the rapporteur has quite rightly drawn attention to this, for schools, teachers and places of education to prepare people for the euro. The euro must become part of education across the board. It is not enough to have a few successful but extremely modest Socrates projects about the euro in Europe’s schools. No, this is really a job that needs to be successfully handled at local level. I think it would be wonderful if the schools, Europe’s young people, welcomed the euro as a tangible sign of Europe, and if everyone used their own preparations to communicate with others. This is also something that the older generation, who are generally so sceptical about the euro, could do. Why should older people in the European Union not use their experience, their knowledge and also the time that they have available in order to make the euro a success? Maybe this is an area where we could have a kind of new pact between the generations that would help the euro project to succeed. The Commission certainly needs to work even more closely with us and to step up the pace of its involvement. But we should not forget that the resources for the information campaign are extremely slight and have to be shared out between the Member States. No company introducing an important product would rely on such modest resources to ensure that a product was a success. A powerful argument in favour of the euro is the initial positive experience with monetary union, which has in fact provided protection against turbulent currency markets in recent times. But it is also a matter of turning information into education, because at the end of the day we need to acquire a totally new way of looking at prices, making calculations and judging values. We should not be deceived by the painless transition on 1 January 1999. Nor should we be deceived by the almost automatic transition to the new millennium. We also need to prepare for the euro psychologically. We must all do this together, at all levels of the European Union!

Political group: PSE