Mr President, Mr President-in-Office, Mr President of the Commission, ladies and gentlemen, Mr Berlusconi, you received loud applause for your speech here in the European Parliament. I hope that will be indicative of the success of the Italian Presidency that we all expect and hope for. I would like to make a request to everyone, no matter what side of the House you are on, that certain debates taking place in all the Member States of the European Union should not be escalated to European level, and in that way prevent us from achieving our objectives at that level. We must now achieve the great and ambitious objectives before us. (Applause from the right) Let me spell this out clearly: my group will be monitoring the Italian Presidency objectively, fairly and in a spirit of constructive criticism, just as it does with every presidency. Sometimes people have no sense of symbolism. However, I am very aware of all the competent people representing Italy not just here in Parliament, but also in the European Council and on the Commission: you yourself, Mr President-in-Office, Mr Fini, who has represented you in the Convention and played an important part in its work, Mr Frattini, Italy's Foreign Minister, Mr Buttiglione, Italy's Minister for Europe, the President of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, and last but not least the Italian Commissioner Mario Monti. I was very pleased that your own comments and those of the Commission President were in agreement. Just at the moment we cannot help thinking about 25 March 1957, when the Rome Treaties were signed on the Capitol in Rome. You now have the fantastic task – some might see it as a burden, but it really is a splendid opportunity – of making your own contribution by means of specific actions, so that at the end of this year we will be able to say that we have the European Constitution of Rome, which will then be signed in Rome, on the Capitol perhaps, by when the ten new countries from central and southern Europe, that is Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Malta and Cyprus and their citizens will belong to the European Union. What a great moment in history! I do not know if I should offer your Foreign Minister, Mr Frattini, my condolences or congratulations on the fact that in the coming weeks and months he will have the enormous task, reporting to you, Mr President-in-Office, of carrying out the practical work needed to achieve that goal. Let me reassure the Italian Presidency and all our friends in Italy that my group will do its utmost to ensure that this will be a great success and that we will be able to achieve a European Constitution. (Applause from the right) Mr President-in-Office, I would specifically like to thank you for repeating here today – and I think that this involved a departure from your written text – what you said last week in Rome to the Conference of Presidents. You said that you would ensure that, when Heads of State and Government meet, then our own President will of course also be present, and that representatives of the European Parliament will also be present when the foreign ministers meet to discuss the constitution. I would like to thank you for that assurance, but we will be watching to make sure that this actually happens. I would like to repeat the sincere thanks I addressed yesterday to our representatives in the Praesidium of the Convention, Iñigo Méndez de Vigo and Klaus Hänsch, for the excellent work they have done. My thanks to them also go to all the Members of this House who have participated in the Convention, including the chairman of our group in the Convention, Elmar Brok. We trust that, with Parliament’s support, it will now be possible to achieve a result by the end of the year. Mr President-in-Office, you talked about strong European institutions. Yesterday, in the presence of the President of the Italian Parliament, Ferdinando Casini, of Helmut Kohl, Honorary Citizen of Europe, of the French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, and of many others, we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of our group, and it was made clear once again that we, in the Group of the , stand for a Community of Europe, because we know that a return to mere cooperation between governments would be a step backwards. That is why Europe's institutions need to be strong, and in the final analysis that must be the outcome of the debate on the constitution. We know at the same time that we Europeans have our roots in our home countries, in our own regions, and that our European citizenship flows from our nationalities and the countries from which we come. A strong European Union does not therefore conflict with our home countries – it complements them. Unfortunately I do not have as much speaking time as the President of the European Council and the President of the Commission. (Laughter and heckling) I therefore wish to limit myself to just one more point. Mr President-in-Office, you mentioned infrastructure projects. We will be looking at that very carefully. But we will also be asking ourselves this question: will the stability of the euro, which also needs to be represented abroad – and I particularly agree with you about that, Mr Prodi – be undermined by this? We do not want that to happen. We want to defend a strong euro and the stability of our new European currency. In conclusion I would like to say, Mr President-in-Office of the European Council, that we wish both you personally and your much-loved country, Italy, a resounding success. We also and above all wish that success for the sake of the European Union. I am delighted that my Socialist friends agree – if you can continue along those lines we will be able to talk about a shared success. If we can achieve that, it will for evermore be written in our history books that on 16 April 2003, 10 countries in Central and Southern Europe signed the accession treaties, and we will then have a European Constitution, signed in Rome, with effect from 1 May 2004. I wish you every success with that, and my group will continue to follow you along that path in a spirit of constructive criticism. (Applause from the right)

Political group: PPE-DE