Mr President, Commissioner, absent representatives of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, today the budget has a Swedish accent and I believe Swedish is a language of consensus and agreement between everybody. In view of their spirit of openness and their quest for common positions, I would like to thank the two rapporteurs, Mr Göran Färm and Mr Per Stenmarck, for the work they have done. Göran Färm is one more in a long list of rapporteurs who are faced with the fundamental dilemma of Category 4 of external actions, that is, whether the Council or the Commission should have the last word in terms of setting external political priorities, or whether Parliament should have its say. Every single year we hold the same debate at first reading. The Commission presents a preliminary draft that cuts the Union’s traditional external priorities; the Commission cuts the appropriations approved by this Parliament the previous year and explains that the programmes in question have not been implemented satisfactorily. Then comes the first reading in the Council and, taking advantage of the previous explanation by the Commission, it cuts the appropriations intended for external actions even further, using the pious moral justification of budgetary savings and the principles of sound financial management. Next comes the stage we are at now, in which Parliament reinstates the lost appropriations, restates the external priorities and reminds the other two institutions that this is an exercise involving three of us. I belong to the parliamentary majority that viewed the Berlin financial perspectives of 1999 as sufficient and correct. I voted for them and campaigned for them. I do not share the view of some Members that those financial perspectives should be revised. Now, I recognise that we are in an increasingly complicated situation. New external commitments arise, which are happily taken up either by the Council or by Mr Prodi, or by both in unison – although that hardly ever happens. These commitments then have to be met within a very strict financial framework, made up of non-obligatory expenditure, which we MEPs are asked to respect. Since not all commitments can be met, however, and not everything can be funded when money is scarce, we have to turn to the excuse of the poor implementation of certain geographical programmes. I do not believe that excuse is any good anymore. We MEPs vote for appropriations which originate from the money of the European citizens so that it can be spent to fund external aid programmes. Commissioner, your task and that of the other Commissioners and the Council is to ensure that these programmes are implemented. You are the Community’s executive. I do not know whether it is the fault of Latin America or the Mediterranean countries, for example, that their programmes have a low level of implementation, but I do know that their needs are real. I know that the solution is not to reduce year after year the appropriations we approve, to reduce programmes, but, as we all know, to find new ways to improve implementation. We hope that for next year – and this is a desire that we express every year at first reading – that the Commission, rather than cutting the money of the previous year, will even request more money in order to comply with the European Parliament’s traditional external priorities. I believe that, in terms of applying cuts, the efforts of the Council are quite sufficient, since it is a great specialist in that area.

Political group: PPE-DE