Mr President, I believe that the applause which followed the intervention of the President of the Group of the expressed very clearly the feeling of this Parliament. We feel that this is not the right time to hold this debate. And this, Mr President, is because this debate is very important, not only for the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, but also for the Union in general and for those people who want Europe to be effective, more democratic and more just. Just the other day, another MEP asked me: “What solutions does the European Parliament propose for the Intergovernmental Conference?” And I answered in the same way as I will today, that this is not the time for solutions or proposals, but rather the time to decide what the Intergovernmental Conference is going to deal with and what method it will use in its work. And that is what the report drawn up by Mr Dimitrakopoulos and Mr Leinen has done, and furthermore it has been a good illustration of how two intelligent people can reach reasonable agreements. I believe that the resolution tabled by the Committee on Constitutional Affairs is politically intelligent; it deals with the issues and takes a very clear and decisive political line. And what is that line? Well, Mr President, it is one which is dictated by common sense. The Treaty of Amsterdam did not resolve the issue of the institutional questions facing us. And the signatories of the Treaty recognised this since they added a protocol, the protocol concerning the institutions in preparation for the enlargement of the European Union, specifically to see how these questions should be resolved in the future. That protocol envisaged a dual institutional reform. The first one for a European Union of less than 21 Member States and the second for when it has more: an initial mini-reform and a second broader one. The logic of that Protocol on the institutions tallied with the Commission’s Agenda 2000 document, which envisaged an initial enlargement which we will call 5+1. Now President Prodi’s new proposal breaks with this logic, because there are no longer 5+1, but rather 12 in the race. This new thinking has now broken with the thinking of the Protocol on the institutions. Therefore, that first small reform, in which we only had to consider the Commission and the weighting of votes in the Council and to which the Cologne Declaration has also added the possible extension of qualified majority voting, does not make much sense and responds to a different political logic. Therefore we are talking about the second part of the Protocol on the institutions; we are facing a more profound reform of the European Union, which prepares it for enlargement. To this end, Mr President, I think that we should combine this demand, which before I called common sense, with what the President-in-Office of the Council said: that which is possible. But I believe that the Presidency of the Council has a great responsibility at the moment, because assessing what is possible should not prevail over the dictates of common sense. We already know that, as a general rule, the governments do not want to change things too much; they are happy to make do with what we have. However, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, we must push them a little bit, because otherwise, what I fear you understand to be “what is possible” will be too little for the needs of the European Union. I think that the report by Messrs Dimitrakopoulos and Leinen is full of good ideas, is absolutely reasonable and establishes the points which, in our opinion, should be considered at the upcoming Intergovernmental Conference. My group, on whose behalf I am speaking, is very much in agreement with this report, but I am going to mention three amendments which may be added to it and whose vote I will request in this House: My group’s Amendment No. 18 which requests that Parliament be consulted on the annual economic guidelines, the decisions involving budgetary short-falls and any other important decision which has to be taken within the framework of European Economic and Monetary Union, of course leaving to one side the independence of the European Central Bank. It seems to me that this is an issue that this Parliament should be involved in. Amendment No. 26 in which we also incorporate, with regard to the distribution of competences, the principle of subsidiarity. And finally any of the Amendments, Nos. 47, 26, 27 or 28, which talk of flexibility. I believe that we should open the debate on flexibility. But all of this, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, should take into account an essential element: we should not forget what the European Community has meant over all these years nor the thing which is most important to the Community, which is the principle of integration. That is what we have to preserve and that, if we do not carry out the appropriate reforms, will be very difficult to preserve in a Europe of 28.

Political group: PPE-DE