Mr President, I too want to focus solely on the contribution that the Thessaloniki Council can make to a positive outcome of the Convention and hence to useful preparation for the Intergovernmental Conference. At the moment, it is not easy to foresee at what stage the Convention will have reached on the eve of Thessaloniki, what text the Chairman, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, will submit to the Council or what level of consensus will have been reached in the Convention. I do not think that everything will be clarified and settled before Thessaloniki and, in any case, it is down to the Council to provide further stimulus towards fully attaining the objectives set by the Laeken Declaration of December 2001, the main points of which have already been listed by President Prodi. For my part, I would like to recall the content and tone of that declaration, especially in relation to the duties that the European Union must perform and the challenges that it must meet. It would be worrying if the conclusions, firstly of the Convention and then of the Intergovernmental Conference, did not live up to those expectations. I feel that I need to sound the alarm here: were the questions raised by the Laeken Declaration on the European Union’s global role or on greater coordination of economic policies and so on, merely rhetorical questions? Beware! If we failed to meet the expectations that these questions raised among European citizens and world opinion, we would bear a heavy responsibility. The risk exists now, and it can be inferred from the text adopted thus far by the Praesidium of the Convention, yielding to the growing pressure from certain heads of government of the larger countries, particularly with regard to the Chapter on the Institutions, the Council’s decision-making procedures and also the future procedures for reviewing the Treaty. In various regards, it would perhaps be instructive to reread the Treaty for which Altiero Spinelli was rapporteur, which was adopted by Parliament in February 1984. President Prodi has already said a great deal in very clear terms regarding the serious contradictions and the shortcomings of the text adopted so far by the Praesidium on institutional matters. I would just like to reassert the positions expressed by Parliament, which as an institution has not kept quiet, has not relied solely on its 16 representatives at the Convention – unfortunately only 16 out of 105 – but, through the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, it has made many contributions and sparked major debates during which – I want to stress this above all – a clear position was taken against the idea of a full time President of the European Council. In order to strengthen the authority of the European Council as a college, we have put forward other proposals, without excessively customising them and not just concentrating on having a President-in-Office for two and a half or five years. Mr Poettering pointed out that we must delete the idea of incompatibility envisaged between holding the mandate of President of the European Council and holding other European mandates. It is essential to remove the idea of incompatibility with holding a national mandate too, because if we establish a full time President of the European Council – albeit calling the post ‘chairman’ or trying to draw up a restrictive job description – all the elements of duplication, or dualism in the leadership of the Union, which have been condemned for being extremely confusing with regard to executive functions, will inevitably come about. Lastly, as Mrs Frassoni and Mr Bonde have already said, it must be stressed that Laeken did indeed appoint a Chairman and a Vice-Chairman, but it granted a collective mandate to the Convention as a whole. I believe that the Thessaloniki Council must issue a warning in this respect, so that we do not take a path where the personal opinions of the Chairman of the Convention or the compromise opinions of the Praesidium override majority opinions, supported by a broader consensus in the Convention plenary.

Political group: PSE