Mr President, President Prodi, ladies and gentlemen, the report drafted by my colleague Mr Méndez de Vigo and myself enjoys the support of a very large majority in the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, with only Mr Bonde, Mr Berthu and Mr Sacrédeus being opposed to it. So a substantial majority shares the position we have taken and I am pleased to learn today that the Belgian Presidency agrees with many parts of it and that even the Commission can go along with many of the points Parliament has made. A powerful current of opinion sees Laeken as an important opportunity that we must seize in order to make our European Union more democratic and more capable of taking action. If that is so, Laeken is perhaps the last chance to do this before enlargement, when the EU is enlarged from fifteen States to between twenty-five and thirty. I am very grateful to all those who have helped to prepare the way for the new method. I find myself thinking back to the beginning of the year, and back in January or February all this seemed a long way in the distance. I thank all those who have contributed to a new method really becoming possible – a convention in which the representatives of the parliaments will enjoy equal rights with the representatives of the governments in giving shape to this project for the future of this European Union of ours. The Convention, though, must not be a merely cosmetic exercise, and I believe it would be very unsatisfactory if we were to simply list the options that are already present in Europe. That these options are there, we know from the speeches of our Heads of State. They are well known, and they are nothing new. This Convention must be a political forum for grappling with solutions, one in which real effort is made to reach a consensus as to how we, in Europe, are to go forward. That is the real task. That we are to produce various proposals, be they federalist or, on the other hand, intergovernmental in nature, sounds very appealing, but, President Prodi, if we produce a hotchpotch of proposals, can we then expect strong responses from the Intergovernmental Conference? I very much doubt it. The governments have the same problem. They can come up with whatever they will, but the Intergovernmental Conference's unanimity principle results in the same sort of blockade that we had in Amsterdam and Nice. No, I believe that the Convention represents the great opportunity to use the consensus method to arrive at the overwhelming majority. What emerges is not unanimity, but the overwhelming tendency, the overwhelming majority. If we go to the IGC with such a coherent proposal, we maximise the likelihood of it being accepted, because governments naturally find it hard to deny themselves consensus. Issues still remain to be negotiated, and all this will have to be put into the form of a legal text. All this work will have to be done by the IGC, but I would warn against restricting the Convention's role to that of drawing up options using different terminology. That is not the task for a political forum such as a Convention. We note that, at Laeken, the Council proposed someone to preside over the Convention; that is all well and good, but I do think that the Convention should be able to confirm him in office, and should be able to elect him. A Convention elects its own President, and that is the procedure that should take place. President Prodi, you spoke in terms of a small Bureau. Such a Bureau would have a great deal to do, being the organ that would have to direct this great Convention, and it would be advantageous if the opposition parties, both from the national parliaments and from the European Parliament, could have as much a sense of being represented in it as did the majority. Turning to the timetable, I am glad that the governments themselves state that more or less one year is needed, which would mean that the Convention would complete its work in June 2003. There would then be a break, but just for the summer recess. I am in favour of us all resting from our labours in July and August, so that the IGC can begin in September under the Italian Presidency and we can complete the constitutional treaty by the end of 2003, in good time for the European elections and also for enlargement. With such a document we could stand before the peoples of Europe; it is my belief that, if the Treaty is successful to the extent that children can read it at school and understand it, then we will also be reducing the citizens' alienation from Europe, which is the task before us. (Applause)

Political group: PSE