Mr President, I propose that Parliament should confirm Mr Lukas Papademos's appointment as Vice-President of the European Central Bank, in accordance with the committee's unanimous vote. Confirmation of the proposed candidate is not merely a matter of course. It results from a hearing in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs and therefore has to do with monetary policy being transparent. Experts may well know the President of the Central Bank, but Europe's citizens do not, yet they must be able to trust the Vice-President. As a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, he will have a part in decisions on the euro zone's monetary policy which will affect growth and employment and thus people's lives. After all, it is money that must serve people, not the other way round. Decisions on monetary policy are the work of man, which means that they primarily call for personal integrity and character, skills, great experience of the economy and monetary affairs, and also a willingness to be candid. The hearing emphasised the importance of these qualifications. The new Vice-President is the first new member of the first Executive Board, which was so successful in preparing and introducing the euro. What underlines the independence of the members of the Executive Board is that re-election to it is not permitted, and so this is renewed proof of personal independence. The European Central Bank's independence – which I must re-emphasise today – is truly a constituent element in European Monetary Union. At the end of the day, policy on money and currency is not neutral. No institutions in a democracy can be infallible or function under the cloak of darkness; rather, democracy and integration policy make the transparency of decisions and of the reasons behind them inseparable from the European Central Bank's role. Such transparency is, by the way, not only in the interests of European democracy, but also in the interests of the European Central Bank, which is thereby – and as recent years have clearly demonstrated – made more credible, more legitimate and more trustworthy. It is in the popular interest and in the interest of the market that we want to build up this authority. After all, as the renowned economist Joseph Schumpeter once said, a people's monetary affairs reflect everything that that people desires, endures, and is. It is Parliament's view that the European Central Bank is far more transparent than previous national central banks in Europe and that, that being the case, we have undergone a kind of cultural revolution in the countries of the euro zone. Parliament's dialogue with the European Central Bank on monetary affairs has made a real contribution to this. This is not, in the final analysis, just about the publication of monthly, quarterly or annual reports, but also, in fact, about a monetary dialogue to question not only decisions on monetary policy but also the background to them. We who are in Europe's Parliament, though, must continue to insist on these publications being followed by the publication of brief Minutes and of the voting record. The US Federal Reserve has just decided to announce, on the same day that decisions on monetary policy are taken, how the individual members of its Board of Governors voted on them, so that everyone can know who voted for what. For Parliament, the publication of the voting record without names would be every bit as adequate as publishing the arguments for or against a particular decision, as what is important for us to know is that they have not only, in fact, given consideration to price stability, the primary objective of monetary policy, but also to its secondary objective, namely the European Union's support for growth and employment. It is interesting to note that an American study emphasises that, in the USA, the way Federal Reserve Board members vote is determined not only by the problems posed by the risk of inflation, but also by the problem of unemployment. It would be reassuring to learn that members of the Board of the European Central Bank were influenced by this in view of it being the secondary task of monetary policy, as I have said, to support growth and employment, and in view of it having hitherto been unclear to Parliament how the European Central Bank defines the achievement of this second objective. This very year, it will be crucial to achieve clarity on this point, because the faltering recovery in Europe should not be halted by decisions on monetary policy. It became very clear, in Mr Papademos' vice-presidential nomination hearing, how important the interpretation of these objectives in Article 105 of the Treaty establishing the European Community is to him, and so I would again like to reiterate our support for his appointment, the legitimacy of which should be underlined by this confirmation procedure, even if it lacks significance in law. Anything else would require reform of the Treaty establishing the European Community. (Applause)

Political group: PSE