Mr President, I am truly amazed – I freely admit – by the last speaker as the official spokesman of the group. I really expected nothing of the sort. I would have expected him to be closer to us, now that we know that the have tabled a proposed amendment rejecting this supplementary and amending budget. But nothing should come as a surprise in the European Parliament, especially not in this area. The common foreign and security policy is one of the policies of the European Union which, to all intents and purposes, has yet to be developed. In the past, it is true, we had a situation in which several Commissioners had to agree between themselves as to who was to look after and deal with which part of the world. At times we remember this and smile. But, when you look at politics from the point of view of content, it is irresponsible of the European Union not to speak with one voice and to behave like a dwarf in the world when it is in fact an economic global player and – to put it nastily – could in theory push the Secretary-General and representative of the common foreign and security policy around like an operetta general. That is why we are convinced that anyone who wants to take the common foreign and security policy seriously and really implement it, anyone who wants to prevent the lack of European policy in the foreign policy area that we have seen over recent years, must support the common foreign and security policy. This morning, Mr Brok said in the debate on the transatlantic dialogue that we, as the European Union, had no profile in Ukraine and that blunders had been made, which is why we must take the Council's desire to make real progress here seriously and support it. So support in principle is there. When the supplementary and amending budget was presented to us – and here I concur fully with Mr Ferber – not only did it fail to convince us; on the contrary we got all worked up and opposed to it. It is wrong to try and hide such an important area which is so crucial to the future of the European Union beneath a gentlemen's agreement between Parliament and the Council in a budget over which only the Council has any influence. All that does is to demonstrate that you do not want any parliamentary control or any parliamentary support. Which is unacceptable. We said as much from the outset and we shall continue to take this view and to formulate our policy and vote accordingly. But if you enter into negotiations and can clear up this point, i.e. if you can demonstrate that the supplementary and amending budget has been changed so that we can assume in future that we have are involved and have a say, when there is a separate chapter under which the Council shapes future policy in the common foreign and security policy area with parliamentary support and control, then you have to agree to it if you really want to make progress. That is not the time to stand on the sidelines and say, we are waiting to see what happens next. In all events, one thing is clear: when in reply to questions from the relevant Commissioner one is told in the Committee on Foreign Affairs or in the Committee on Budgets, with the wink of an eye, according to my sources, that there is no overlap, then it is hardly surprising that people ask questions and want to know exactly how things stand. What we shall not support – and I say this now as a member of the budgetary authority, we are talking here first and foremost as the budgetary authority – are overlapping structures. We cannot stand and watch two different people doing the same work under the same structures for the same tasks in the European Union. That cannot be. In this respect, we have to know what the common foreign and security policy should look like in the future and who is to be responsible for it. We need concepts here and the Council and Commission need to know where they stand here. We shall, of course, bring our standpoint very clearly to bear in the overall debate. We shall wield our power as budgetary authority on every future demand in order to stop this sort of blunder. Now is not the time to be petty. Europe's share of the common foreign and security policy is still very small. We should not start by being petty. But we shall monitor how everything develops very closely, we shall address painful subjects and say stop as soon as we get the feeling that we are being taken for a ride. That cannot be. We shall agree here, but everyone should know that we shall be extremely vigilant in connection both with heading 5 and with how expenditure develops and with future developments in the common foreign and security policy. Of course, we shall also give our input so that a forward-looking policy for the world and for Europe as a whole can be developed.

Political group: PSE