Mr President, on behalf of the Group I would like to join others in expressing our solidarity, sympathy and condolences for the Italian carabinieri and other victims of the attack in Iraq last week and, of course, the victims of the horrific attacks on the synagogues in Istanbul. I would like to depart from the political pyrotechnics of some of the previous interventions and focus on the subject at hand today – the annual legislative programme. I would first like to stress that the Group defends the right of the Commission President to express himself personally on political issues concerning the future of the European Union. I must however say that, as a Liberal who treasures the diversity and pluralism of public opinion, I have some personal doubts about the wisdom of advocating two opposing blocks in the European debate either here or, more generally, in the Member States. Turning to the annual programme, other colleagues will speak on the Eurostat issue later. The Group has consistently welcomed the progress made over the last few years in the way in which the Commission has presented this important document. Only a few years ago it was nothing more than an arbitrary shopping list of legislative and non-legislative proposals. There has been an attempt, both this year and in previous years, to include some strategic thinking and we welcome some of the recent innovations, such as the move towards more rigorous impact assessment procedures. However, as President Prodi himself rightly indicated, there is still much room for improvement, and we would like to highlight three areas in which we consider that the document presented to us today is still seriously lacking. Firstly, the selection of the three strategic priorities – namely enlargement, stability and growth – is fine. However, those priorities are so open-ended it is almost impossible to imagine anyone disagreeing with them. It is equally impossible to imagine any legislative or non-legislative proposal that would not fall under those three strategic priorities. In other words there seems to be no real choice about what the European Commission is proposing this year, and no choice about what the strategic priorities of the European Union should be. On the contrary, there is a risk of a very open-ended approach towards EU business because of the very open-ended nature of the three priorities themselves. Secondly, there is no discernible link between those three vague priorities and the lengthy annexes containing legislative and non-legislative proposals. We understand that one of the annexes – both of which include around fifty legislative proposals – is supposed to relate to the priorities, while the other is not. Those of you who have examined the lists will have seen that they are interchangeable. They are not clearly organised according to the priorities, but seem to have been organised artificially into two categories. In other words, the priorities themselves do not seem to have guided the selection of legislative and non-legislative proposals before us today, which again gives a somewhat artificial tenor to the selection of the proposals presented to us. Thirdly, as both the President of the Commission and the President-in-Office of the Council have mentioned, this summer we all signed an interinstitutional agreement explicitly designed to ensure better law-making in the European Union. The Commission explicitly committed itself, in that interinstitutional agreement, to explain fully today when it presents its annual legislative programme, firstly the choice of legislative instrument for each proposal, and secondly the choice of legal base. There are some indications on the legal bases, in these lengthy, somewhat impenetrable annexes, but no reference whatsoever to the choice of legislative instrument. It cannot be that, a few months after the signing of an interinstitutional agreement on better law-making, the Commission fails, at the first hurdle, to honour the promises made in that agreement. It bodes extremely ill for the improvement of law-making for that to be the case. This is a terrifically important moment in the political and legislative cycle in the European Union. It is the moment when the European Commission exercises its supreme privilege and prerogative – namely the monopoly right of initiative. That right of initiative is only ever defensible if exercised in a fully accountable, transparent manner in which motives are fully explained and political accountability is fully safeguarded. On the basis of what we have seen today, we do not believe that to be the case. There is still very significant room for improvement. (Applause)

Political group: ELDR