Mr President, Commissioner, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, we have a budget before us which – contrary to what we otherwise hear about budget proposals – is shrinking, not growing. That may be a response to conditions in the Member States. Certainly, this budget is equipped with fewer resources. As a response to what is happening in the Member States, we must undoubtedly say: yes, we must manage the taxpayers’ money prudently, and as the Group of the , we will do that. However, we must also set priorities for the budget. That is something which we will certainly do. Let me start with an issue which – if Commissioner Schreyer is right, and I hope she is – will fall to us too as a task for the future. Let us talk about the revenue side of the EU budget. The revenue side – that means: where is the money coming from? Who pays? We pay from the taxpayers’ money. As we have observed, some estimates in Europe suggest that as much as twenty billion is being lost as a result of VAT fraud. Anyone who accepts this VAT fraud also accepts the shortfalls in revenue at European level. We are not prepared to accept that – because all these shortfalls must be made good out of the ordinary taxpayer’s pocket. During this budgetary procedure, we will therefore be proposing that the campaign against VAT fraud be stepped up in order to ease the burden on the ordinary taxpayer, so that the money that should be flowing to Europe can actually do so. We will have to debate this issue more often as part of the budget process from now on as well. In future budgetary procedures – including the next one – we will ensure that citizens can see for themselves that dependability is guaranteed as one of our fundamental values. This means dependability in combating the economic and social gap, and it means dependability in tackling unemployment. We have heard that the Council has slashed payments for the Structural Funds in particular. This raises a number of questions, in our view. On the one hand, the Member States are registering the substantial amounts of money which they intend to spend in the coming years, and especially next year. Yet at the same time, the Council has agreed, in its draft budget, that spending must be kept below these same figures. We wonder which of these figures is correct. We know that arrears have arisen in respect of commitments undertaken in the past, where payment has not yet taken place. The Council neatly sidesteps this issue and claims: ‘We don’t need the payments.’ We will not get involved in this game. Anyone reaching agreement, after tough negotiations, on the Financial Perspectives, especially in relation to the Structural Funds and therefore structural and economic development in the European Union, must also accept that when it comes to implementation, he will be reminded of his commitments and we will demand payment of the appropriate amounts. In the next budget year, we will take care to ensure that the European Union, as an economic area, is not just an economic area for major companies and corporations. We will push for intensive support for SMEs in future too. They are the backbone of the European economy. They are creative, innovative and willing to take risks, and we must give them our support so that even though they have no legal departments and no tax departments, they can benefit from the European Union and the internal market. Fourthly, in the budgetary procedure, we will ensure that enlargement is shaped on the basis of certainty. There have been various references already to the staffing issue. We will be looking very closely at what staffing levels are actually required in order to ascertain whether every one of the stated vacancies is genuinely needed. However, we will not allow enlargement and the accession countries to become the European Union’s piggy bank. I agree with all the previous speakers here. There must be equality. Decisions like this are the best indicators of whether or not equality genuinely exists. Anyone can voice noble intentions, but it is the decisions themselves that show whether there really is equal treatment, regardless of whether an old or a new Member State is involved. We will monitor this very carefully. In other areas too, we will continue to maintain continuity to some extent, but we will also have to shape our policy in a future-oriented way. This applies especially to foreign policy. Here, it has been our frequent experience in recent years that whenever a crisis situation develops anywhere in the world, we have responded in the heat of the moment and immediately pledged to make additional resources available, sometimes at the expense of established policies. If we look at some parts of the world which we supported in the past, we see that fewer resources are available than in previous years. We have had to restructure. We have done so because we have also recognised, of course, that we cannot increase the funding indefinitely. However, I would like to cite two statistics which, while not relating directly to our budget, do give us food for thought. Today, the United States of America and the countries of the European Union spend 460 billion every year on defence. 460 billion! Yet we spend just 37 billion on development. Is this really a forward-looking policy, one that is aimed at conflict prevention? Is it the kind of policy that developed states should be pursuing? The answer is ‘no’, which is why we want to develop European policy further within the bounds of what is possible – and that is modest enough. We want to work preventively. We want to develop conflict management strategies that will stop such conflicts from occurring in the first place. We are not so naive as to believe that there will be no more conflicts in the world. There will always be conflicts and our region, our Member States, must deal with that. Nonetheless, we will focus more intensively on prevention. A further area in which we must work preventively is demographic change. The European continent is changing dramatically. We see that the average population is ageing considerably, not only in individual countries but in all countries. That has an impact on all institutions and agencies. It not only means that there will, in future, be fewer kindergartens, or that we will need fewer kindergartens at local level. It will also have an impact on us. Let me once again give as an example the pensions burden, which we will have to shoulder. In many other areas, too, we will see that the numbers of young people are steadily dwindling and there are more and more older people. We must deal with this situation by shaping it positively. It should be viewed not as a threat but an opportunity. We in the Group of the will apply a number of criteria to this budget. The first is financial prudence, because we are dealing with our citizens’ money. The second is dependability. Everyone must see that what we start, we finish, and that we do not drag our feet or drop it half way through. The third is this: we will shape European policies in a way which enables us to work preventively instead of being caught on the hop when situations occur. We will endeavour to monitor developments early on, structure them appropriately and thus shape the European Union, our European continent, so that we have a good and secure future together.

Political group: PSE