Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner Schreyer, ladies and gentlemen, I should like to add my thanks to Carlos, Kathalijne, Francesco, Esko, Joane and Terry. It is they, of course, who have provided us with these documents for today’s debate, and I believe they have done an outstanding job. The result we shall obtain from all of this will be a very good one. Allow me at this point, I spoke out of turn last time, to address Mr Vande Lanotte, the representative of the Council. After Mrs Parly last year, you are the second President of the Council whom I shall remember with profound gratitude. If this trend continues in the coming years, if this level is consistently maintained, we shall yet manage to establish really close cooperation and mutual trust one of these days between the Council and Parliament. Keep an eye on us, Commissioner – you must treat us better, otherwise you will suddenly find that we are far more in tune with them than with you. The point I wish to put to the President-in-Office, however, concerns Laeken. As I have already remarked, one of the things you will be discussing in Laeken, naturally enough, is the future structure of the European Union, and this discussion will not be confined to the question of a constitution in the sense of defining the structure and purpose of each component of the Union. No, we must also talk about the way in which we can achieve a budget that is transparent in every respect. It is impossible to explain to any of our citizens the fact that, having underspent various allocations by 4.6 billion euros, as the Commissioner said, we should be fighting for weeks and months here to obtain an extra 200 million or, when acute emergencies occur, that we actually have to push the entire budget back and forth to deal with them at the expense of our long-term strategies and basic political aims. We have had to make a large amount available for Afghanistan this year, and indeed it is very important that the people there do not merely see Europe as an authority that comes to punish but that they also experience Europe as a helper coming to assist them in their development. We have allocated aid to the fishing regions and aid to the border regions. This, too, was very important, because it signalled to the world that we are taking the current changes seriously and that we are restructuring in response to them. Allow me a brief remark in parenthesis. Time and again, as we all know, the cry from Bavaria has been that we need money for the border regions. These are the selfsame Bavarians who, on other occasions, denounce the system of revenue redistribution among the Länder and who, in CDU and CSU papers on structural issues, advocate the scrapping of all structural aid. On such occasions they turn round and demand a great deal more money. I have been a very fervent supporter of assistance for border regions and shall continue to support it, but those who beat the drum with high-powered press releases must ask themselves whether this is a consistent way to act. We also have fundamental matters to deal with. We must forge ahead with the reform of the Commission, because we want a modern administrative system. We must forge ahead on e-learning, one of the areas with the highest growth potential in a developing economic area like the European Union, not only because we want to grasp our economic opportunities but also because we want to avoid a split within our populations between those who can afford to acquire computers at a very early stage and those who are excluded from the information society. We must cooperate more effectively in Europol and Eurojust to combat terrorism. We cannot have a situation in which the criminals are driving Ferraris and the police are trying to chase them in Fiat Unos! I mention these two makes of car deliberately, because they come from a certain country, a country that would do well to consider what it is doing to Europe at the present time. In the domain of foreign policy too, we must agree to tackle important issues. The Balkans must continue to receive attention. So must the Mediterranean region. But we must also heed the silent agony of the voiceless in the world. This is why we have been active this year in the struggle against AIDS. Silent agony, however, is easily neglected. We must keep closer watch. We must not wait to be rocked by violent explosions in the world. On the contrary, the European Union must become more sensitive, in cooperation with the regions of the world where our help is needed, especially to the need for food aid to ward off starvation but also to the need to help the countries in those regions to improve their administrative systems and infrastructure, thereby guaranteeing that those countries can develop by their own efforts in a manner which reflects credit on the quality and diligence of European cooperation with the rest of the world. (Applause)

Political group: PSE