Madam President, just for once I would like to begin by thanking the two speakers, both the President-in-office of the Council and the President of the Commission, for the quality of their interventions. I would particularly like to thank Mr Moscovici for the clarity and precision of his words and, in more political terms, for taking up a position in favour of a constitutional process. As concerns Mr Prodi, I believe that we must be grateful to him for having courageously pointed out a number of instances of poor administration in our institutions and, above all, for having very clearly called the intergovernmental method into question. Having said that, we must not let ourselves be overcome by euphoria. Other speakers have already made the point that we must be mindful of the fact that throughout the European Union there is a crisis of confidence in the European Institutions. This crisis of confidence has made itself felt itself in Denmark in particular and, even if the result of the vote there can be interpreted in different ways, there can be no doubt that a section of the Danish electorate wanted to indicate a certain lack of confidence in the European Union, not least in its ineffectiveness and lack of political will in terms of social matters, environmental protection and democratic transparency. (Applause) We now find ourselves three months away from the deadline of the Nice Summit, and I believe that the issue at stake is that of restoring this confidence. We have to provide a response that is visionary – there would now seem to be room for hope in this regard – and potent. We have to jettison something that, sadly, has dominated discussions for too long, a kind of overcautious realism that commonly resembles an inability to act. (Applause) A few words on the Charter of Fundamental Rights, a subject on which I must beg to differ with the previous speakers. This is clearly an exhilarating project. The setting up of the Convention represented a major step towards a more democratic Europe, insofar as the process breaks with the intergovernmental approach. On this point I agree. I would, however, be more critical as concerns the results. Indeed, a detailed analysis of the final text reveals a certain imbalance between economic rights and property rights on the one hand, and social rights and environmental rights on the other. We find ourselves faced with a paradox with, on one side, a Charter which is relatively weak in political terms and, on the other, a desire not to grant this Charter the essential binding status that would make it a citizens’ tool that enabled any European citizen to bring a case before the Court of Justice to uphold their rights. As regards the IGC, I now see a glimmer of hope following the sluggish rate of progress in recent months, but it is certain that if, as Mr Moscovici quite clearly stated, the IGC does not relieve the deadlock by next December, particularly regarding the extension of qualified majority voting, which entails abandoning the right of veto and applying codecision in a more widespread way, this would constitute a setback and we would have to carry on. I believe that deferring the issue would be the worst possible option, both for the citizens of Europe and for the citizens of the candidate countries. As regards enlargement, I do not have time to go into detail but I would like to conclude, Madam President, by stressing the importance of another aspect of enlargement. We expect candidate countries to adapt their institutions, economies and legislative systems, but we must also adapt our own policies. The main challenge before us is that of preventing the European Union from becoming nothing more than one large market place with 500 million consumers and with major structural imbalances. I believe that if we are to meet this challenge, we must launch, at Nice, a constitutional process that will enable this radical reform of the institutions, this restructuring of the hierarchy of values, and which will finally place free trade somewhere other than at the top of the agenda. (Applause)

Political group: Verts-ALE