Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, at the very outset, I would like to give the Italian Council Presidency credit for its intensive efforts, in the Intergovernmental Conference negotiations, to keep as close as possible to what the Convention produced and also to offer solutions that go beyond that. Let me give two examples: the explicit reference to equal opportunities for women and men as being among the values of the European Union was not of the Convention’s doing. That you should propose it, and that it should be accepted, amounts to progress, and that is something we should make clear. Your proposal that decisions in specific areas of the Common Foreign and Security Policy should, subject to certain conditions, be reached by qualified majority voting, goes beyond what the Convention came up with, and that is something I explicitly underline in order to make clear the extraordinarily positive role you play in this. I do, however, have to tell Mr Brok, who is now no longer present, that what you have proposed with regard to the European Central Bank does not interfere with the Bank’s independence. It goes no further than what we want for other areas, that being that decisions on specific technical issues should be capable of being taken by a simplified procedure, and that means that if the Heads of Government want to change something, they have to do so unanimously. Unanimity remains in place; the only thing is that, if we want to sort out technical issues, we do not have to set the whole process of revising the Treaties and the Constitution in motion. Mr President-in-Office of the Council, I believe that we all see this as a quite crucial point, and I would ask the Council Presidency to see it in that light too. As regards Parliament’s budgetary rights, both in medium-term financial planning and in the annual Budget, we cannot and will not accept less than what we have already. Such a thing cannot be acceptable to a democratically elected parliament, and we will resist it with all the means at our disposal. (Applause) I might add that I welcome the unambiguous stance taken up by the Commission on this point. We may well not always be on the same side, but, in this instance, Mr President of the Commission, we are glad of your support, for our allies are thin on the ground where this is concerned. I am glad that you are numbered among them, as also is the Presidency of the Council. There is one final point that I would like to address. I, too, have my criticisms of Naples. Like Mr Fischer, the German Foreign Minister, I came away from Naples more depressed than I was when I went there. My worry is that we are leaving open many issues that will then be squeezed into the package for the Heads of State or Government, and that we will then end up with a repeat of this ‘night of Nice’ and its compromise, not merely on the lowest common denominator, but with a collection of compromises, completely unrelated and mutually contradictory. The danger of a repeat performance of Nice in Brussels on 13 December has become greater since Naples. My fear is that we will then end up with this peculiar ‘rendezvous clause’. For over ten years, ever since Maastricht, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, that really has been the customary flight response of the Heads of State or Government. At Maastricht, we said that we needed the political unification of Europe. We postponed it, deciding that we would do it later. Then we had Amsterdam, and then its celebrated leftovers. They were then deferred until Nice, where you could not sort it out, and so we passed it on to the Convention. Now the Convention has come up with a proposal. Please, I beg you, Mr President-in-Office, do not do the same thing again! The situation is getting no better. If there are more leftovers from any decision taken on 13 December, then the European public as a whole will see that as a failure on the part of the European Union’s Heads of State or Government. Mr President-in-Office, I urge you to prevent such a failure. They will be judged not only on their ability to achieve a result, but also to propagate a solution – and so will you. (Applause)

Political group: PSE