Madam President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Mr President of the Commission, I should like first on behalf of the Group for the European People’s Party and the to extend my warmest thanks to the Finnish Presidency of the Council for its work and its good intentions. Mr President of the Council, your work and the work of your foreign secretary and your minister Kimmo Sasi demonstrate that smaller Member States are also capable of excellent work and we would like to extend our special thanks for that work, especially as this is the first time that the Republic of Finland has taken over the Council Presidency. So please accept our thanks and our recognition. Participants at the Summit and you, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, have spoken of historic decisions. I find this description somewhat premature. Time will tell if the decisions taken at Helsinki were in fact historic in the positive sense or, possibly, historic in a negative sense. Only historians will be able to say if Helsinki was a Summit of enlargement fever and mini reforms or if it really helped to strengthen the European Union and give Europe the power to act in the 21st century. We hope that it will be the latter and that the Helsinki Summit will become a symbol of Europe’s strength and power to act in the 21st century. That is our hope, but it will depend on action, not the words in the presidency’s conclusions. We welcome the fact that enlargement negotiations are to commence with Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and Malta. This has always been the policy of the Group. Europe needs to grow together now. As far as the question of the reform of the European Union is concerned, we welcome the fact that the way has been opened for further reform beyond the three Amsterdam leftovers and we hope that the Portuguese Presidency of the Council will also do the right thing. But we are concerned, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, to read in point 16 of the Council’s conclusions that the question of the possible extension of qualified majority voting in the Council will be examined. The possibility! No, we do not need to examine the possibility; we need to extend majority voting so that the European Union can continue to expand. We say this quite clearly in the run-up to the intergovernmental conference. (Applause) We are also waiting for the European Union to be given a legal personality. We are also waiting for the European Parliament to be given codecision powers on all legislative matters. We are also waiting for the European Parliament to be given the right to vote on amendments to the Treaty and we agree with the proposals by Dehaene, Weizsäcker and Lord Simon that the right thing to do would be to create a basic treaty and an enlarged treaty, so that the citizens of Europe also know which level is responsible and what the European Union will look like in the 21st century. On Turkey: The President of the Commission, Mr Prodi, rightly says that we need a debate on the geographical borders of the Union. We would have welcomed such a discussion before the decision to grant Turkey candidate status, rather than starting it now. (Applause) As far as Turkey’s status as a candidate country is concerned, we do not wholly agree with the majority of our group. The same applies in the other groups. It is an important question, and there is no harm in having differences of opinion. But the great majority of our group is sceptical because we know that Turkey’s membership will change the political, economic and cultural face of the European Union. We hope, because we regard Turkey as a friend, that it will succeed in building up a real civil society, that it will succeed in giving the ethnic Kurds a real identity, as part of the Turkish federation and the Turkish nation, and we hope that the Turkish military, which is allied with the west – and that is the real tragedy, will moderate its action in relation to the Kurdish question and stop using military intervention rather than dialogue in order to overcome problems which arise with the Kurds. In other words, we hope that Turkey will succeed in building up a real civil society. My final point concerns foreign, security and defence policy. We congratulate the Finnish Presidency, as a traditionally non-aligned country, on having taken a courageous step. But actions speak louder than words. It would be a sorry day for the European Union if we were to talk of European defence without giving the European Union the means to implement European defence and if we were to end up driving a wedge between us and our American partners in NATO. Words must now be backed up by action to strengthen the European Union as a whole and give it the power to act. It must be given a really democratic, human rights-orientated policy so that the European Union can be a stabilising factor, a factor for peace, development, human rights and democracy in the Europe of the 21st century. This is the real task ahead of us and we hope that Helsinki has laid the foundations for it and that words will now be backed up by action. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE