I have voted against the report for the following reasons: Article 308 of the Treaty does not provide the legal basis for giving the European Parliament the right to deal with the matter at this time. The statutes have the effect of being democratically and financially exclusive and also appear to be discriminatory in as much as high thresholds are introduced for determining whether a party is to be counted as a European party. Thus, they do not safeguard justice for minorities and the protection of the latter. There is also an obvious danger, along the lines of American policy, in companies being granted the right to provide financial subsidy to what have been approved as European political parties. Not until the end of 2001 at the earliest will all 15 Member States’ parliaments and governments have ratified the Treaty of Nice. Only then will it be possible for the issue of the financing of European political parties to be dealt with in detail by the European Parliament. Today’s decision is premature. The EC Court of Justice in Luxembourg will examine and ascertain whether Article 308 of the Treaty really can be invoked as a legal basis. It is my conviction that today’s decision will then be declared as being contrary to the Treaty and thus repealed. Article 308 reads: ‘If action by the Community should prove necessary to attain, in the course of the operation of the common market, one of the objectives of the Community and this Treaty has not provided the necessary powers, the Council shall, acting unanimously on a proposal from the Commission and after consulting the European Parliament, take the appropriate measures.’ The European Parliament believes that, to be eligible for subsidy at European level, financed by taxation, a party association must have obtained at least five per cent of the vote in at least a third of the Member States or be represented in the European Parliament or national or regional parliaments in a third of the Member States. The Commission does not want a relative number, but a fixed number, of Member States (five, irrespective of the size of the EU). The European Parliament has made the democratic threshold remarkably high, too high in fact. Large groups of citizens, with representatives in the European Parliament, may be excluded from this financing of parties at European level through taxation. The wording in Article 3 concerning the approach to European political associations and national parties bears witness to a view of the future which I cannot in any way share: ‘the party or its national components’. In this way, the European Parliament has, then, established the national political parties as future ‘national components’ or types of district organisation of what are being called European political parties and which taxpayers around Europe are expected to subsidise. Developed as it was by pioneers with a strong spirit of self-sacrifice, perseverance and faith in the fundamental importance to society of the Christian ethic and view of human beings and of the family, Sweden’s Christian Democratic Party, led by Birger Ekstedt at the beginning of 1964 and by Alf Svensson from 1973, is far too significant and important in terms of democracy to be described as ‘a national component’.

Political group: PPE-DE