Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Mr President of the Commission, ladies and gentlemen: Mr President-in-Office of the Council, you have arrived in Parliament at a time when we are engaged in organising our work for the second half of this term. Our attainment of the great objectives of which you have spoken is dependent on technical on behalf of Europe. Our group warmly welcomes you to Parliament. You have yourself observed that you are here for the first time. We emphatically welcome the fact that you will be here in Parliament on three occasions as President-in-Office of the Council and as Prime Minister of Spain to give an account of the decisions reached under your Presidency. We are grateful to you for that, and we hope that all following Presidencies will learn from your example. We also, though, expect greater transparency in the Council of Ministers and ask of you that the report the Council is now drafting should also lead to real results, making an important step forward towards greater transparency in the Council of Ministers possible under your Presidency. You have spoken, too, about terrorism, and we stand shoulder to shoulder with you. There is no such thing as good and bad terrorism. There is only terrorism, and we must say loud and clear that wherever people are deliberately being killed, whether by ETA in Spain, whether on 11 September, whether in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world, it must be countered by decisive protest from us, and we must combat terrorism with the utmost determination and make democracy and the rule of law the foundation of relations between peoples and people. (Applause) I very much welcomed your reference to Russia, Mr President-in-Office. Whilst needing good relations with Russia, we are aware that there are at present the gravest abuses of human rights taking place in Chechnya. As Christian and European democrats, we declare that the life of a peaceful Muslim in Chechnya or anywhere else in the world is of the same value as the life of a Christian or a non-Christian in the West. We must defend human dignity throughout the world. (Applause) You have also spoken about the euro, and we support what you have said. Let us, in this hour of joy over the euro, which the President of the Commission has described as a gigantic project, let us remember – for the euro has many parents, indeed only too many fathers – that it was people such as Helmut Kohl, the Honorary Citizen of Europe, François Mitterrand and Jacques Delors, who, with the support of others, advanced this great project in those days. I would like also to invoke the name of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the chairman of the Convention, who, with Helmut Schmidt and others in the Seventies, prepared the way for the European Monetary System. I congratulate you on your choice of him. What now matters is that we pursue a policy of stability, for things are changing. I recall how friends in my party looked at Italy before the introduction of the euro, doubted whether Italy should join the common currency and wondered whether policies of stability were really pursued there. I do not want to single out any one country, but all of what we hear today from Italy indicates that the countries in which Italy was formerly criticised could rightly have the same criticism levelled at them today, as they have not been doing what is needed for the stability of the European currency. So let there be restructuring of the budget! We must consolidate Europe as an economic base, which means that it is the small and medium-sized enterprises that we must promote by means of a sensible and moderate fiscal policy, something we strongly support. In order that we might go in the same direction, we need coordination in economic policy and in stability policy – coordination rather than harmonisation. Mr President-in-Office, I very much welcome what you had to say about the Convention. We will quite happily offer the use of our group's meeting room – another great group has met there before, so they may well agree to the offer – but the spirit of our meeting room is today particularly well suited to working on the European project. I have something to ask of you, Mr President-in-Office. It is with great joy that we have heard that our colleague, the former Prime Minister of Luxembourg and one-time President of the European Commission, Jacques Santer, has been appointed by the government of Luxembourg, that is, by Luxembourg's Prime Minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, as Luxembourg's representative to the Convention. (Applause) We ask you most sincerely to exert your influence as President-in-Office of the Council so that all governments send personalities to this Convention whose words carry weight in the national capitals and governments, so that what is decided in the Convention may also have something of a cohesive effect on the national governments in the countries of the European Union. Let me turn to a final aspect, namely enlargement and the Mediterranean dialogue. We are right alongside you as far as the timing for 2002 and the conclusion of the first accession treaties is concerned. Our Group has decided that observers should be sent as soon as possible to the European Parliament from the countries with which the treaties are to be signed – observers who would pass on information to these countries until the European elections, when representatives from these countries will sit as equals in the European Parliament. We strongly support you in the Mediterranean dialogue. We must ensure that people in the countries along the Mediterranean that do not belong to the European Union have a chance and prospects in their own country – in Morocco, in Algeria, everywhere, even in the Arab countries – and do not all come to us. We must help them in this, and I very much welcome the initiatives of the Spanish Presidency. We wish you every success on your way. There will always be a warm welcome for you from us in Parliament. If you meet with success, then it is a success for us all, for the Council Presidency, for Parliament, for the Commission and for the European Union that we share. Great success for you personally, but also for your presidency. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE