Mr President, President-in-Office of the Council, President of the Commission, ladies and gentlemen, although the Belgian Presidency has only just got into gear, many people have the impression, President-in-Office of the Council, that your tour of Europe began earlier with the rather premature launch of the sixteen priorities programme, or even in the wings at Nice, where your well-oiled communications machine managed to project the notion of Laeken even before it was fully appreciated that Nice, in several respects at least, would prove a failure. The road ahead of you is not an easy one. On the one hand, you yourself have chosen it through your ambitious announcements but, on the other hand, you will not have escaped the tricolour rucksack given you as head of government of a country that is traditionally known to be able to reconcile the irreconcilable and, at difficult moments, to have launched visionary proposals that help the European community to progress. On behalf of the Belgian members of the largest group in this Chamber, I wish you the same success as Jean-Luc Dehaene in 1993. He was virtually buried under the weight of praise. We are not part of the coalition headed by you, but we have no intention of putting a spoke in the wheels of your Presidency or of reducing this Chamber to an arena for internal Belgian use. What our predecessors constructed in Europe is too precious to us for that. We are even prepared to give you a helpful push, at least when the race official is not watching, but only if your Presidency sets a course that really improves people’s lot, both here and elsewhere in the world. Mr President, there is insufficient time to dwell on the matters on the agenda, but the list is not really that important. What does matter is the quality of the solutions and the vision that they project. Whether we are talking about the conversion to the euro, enlargement, the Laeken Declaration on the future or the legislative matters, one thing is clear: the people are no longer behind us, they have lost their way, the peloton no longer really knows where the European course is leading it. Prime Minister, work to ensure that people feel at home again in Europe. There are no miracle cures, but there are key words: information, democratic involvement and transparency. In December, you have the king’s permission to use his palace. I hope that you will also be given the use of the royal greenhouses. Their symbolic value is great. Naturally, you will also be expected to ensure that the palace at the summit of Laeken is not demolished. There will be no shortage of demonstrators and troublemakers in Brussels either, unless you ensure that there is real involvement. Why do you not conduct a Europe-wide NGO consultation exercise? Not at the same time as Laeken, but about four weeks beforehand. You would be offering genuine demonstrators the opportunity to make themselves heard in a positive way while it were still of benefit to do so , and if the mass of genuine demonstrators were subsequently absent, the attraction for the anarchist hooligans would be immediately removed. I look forward to your reaction to this suggestion.

Political group: PPE-DE