Madam President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, I would like to welcome the Portuguese Presidency and to say that we will be paying very close attention to the progress made on the most relevant issues and on this presidency’s priorities. These range from enlargement to amendment of the Treaties, from the future of the Lomé Convention to the EU-Africa Summit and from employment issues to the second and third pillars. And we will chiefly be doing this because of our concerns regarding a number of these issues, or rather the way in which they are being handled. This applies to enlargement, to which we do not have any objections in principle, but which we consider is being implemented in an irresponsible way, without any detailed analysis beforehand of the different problems that could arise in each country and ways of avoiding them. Furthermore, there are now more serious doubts about considering Turkey as an applicant country, given that the government of that country is totally failing to address the Kurdish issue adequately or to cease its occupation of Cyprus. There are also serious concerns about the revision of the Treaties. Not so much because effective adjustments may have to be made to the Treaties in view of enlargement, but rather because we fear that there will be a temptation to move towards political inner cabinets for the European Union under this pretext, which would be mistaken and unacceptable. In the case of Africa, although this has not been confirmed here by the presidency, we have learnt with a mixture of satisfaction and a certain unease that preparations for the summit which had been announced here are to be set in train again. We are satisfied because we have always felt it both necessary and desirable to hold such a summit, particularly if it is geared towards launching genuine cooperation between our two continents in an appropriate way, but also because we have always said that it is essential to carry on doing everything to ensure that it takes place. However, we also feel some unease because it seems to us that there is very little time between now and April, which has been identified as the date for this summit, and this will inevitably make proper preparations for the summit difficult, and could even prevent it from taking place at all. In this context, we have duly noted the presidency’s recent statement on Angola. Although this was rather late in coming from the Council, we see it as a step in the right direction, although, particularly because of the positions adopted in this House and in the Joint Assembly, we were hoping for a statement which condemned UNITA more strongly given its clear responsibility for all the tragic events in that country. What really worries us, however, as much as if not more than the way some of the issues under the spotlight may progress over the next six months, is the fact that certain issues of great concern to us do not feature amongst the Portuguese Presidency’s priorities. Economic and social cohesion is being overlooked and is almost being demonised at Community level, and it really is painful to see the Portuguese Presidency also omitting any specific reference to promoting cohesion, despite coming from one of the countries which, in relative terms, is least developed. The low turnout in the recent European Parliament elections confirmed that fundamental democratic deficits exist and indicated that the public was clearly distancing itself from the dominant neo-liberal approach to policy. In spite of this and despite our being on the verge of amending the Treaties, there is no provision for any institutional changes that would put an end to such deficits, and at the same time there is an insistence on such a policy approach without any specific attempt to effectively combat unemployment or to promote employment, which are issues of great concern to the public. We will not be appeased by a special summit on some pompous theme, because there have already been various summits on employment issues, and none of these has resulted in any will to change the prevailing monetarist policies. Furthermore, the objectives and deadlines are so vague and the programmes adopted are so contradictory and over-ambitious, that it seems to us that this is just a smoke screen rather than an event genuinely intended to bring about any marked change in the Community status quo. Mr President-in-Office of the Council, we have an opportunity today to analyse the programme you have presented and the intentions set out in it. In July, however, we will be able to carry out a rigorous, definitive and complete evaluation of the current Portuguese Presidency, and we will not fail to do precisely that!

Political group: GUE-NGL