Madam President, I am pleased to be able to welcome the Swedish Prime Minister once more and see him here together with several of the Swedish ministers. In the Swedish media the Prime Minister has summed up the meeting in Stockholm as an ideal example of a successful European summit. Considering the meagre results, one might wonder what an unsuccessful summit looks like. For those of us who read the newspapers and the conclusions, it is uncertain whether anything happened other than President Putin visiting the summit as a guest. The 15-page conclusion document mainly describes decisions intended to be taken at a later date. It is true that it was decided to start competing on which country has the most children in childcare and that the Commission will complete a project which is already underway. No concrete date was set for deregulation of the electricity and gas markets in the Union. The Swedish Presidency has completely given up on the question of liberalisation of postal services and, as we know, nothing came of the Community Patent idea. Football was played for longer than the question which most concerns Europe today was discussed, namely the agriculture crisis. I think that the Council should evaluate and consider what role these summits should have. Are they to play an important institutional role to resolve and pass decisions on important questions which have achieved little progress at other councils, or should they be developed into gimmicks with ever weaker and more toned down conclusions? It is worrying that the Lisbon Process, which got off to a good start a year ago, is now being watered down. The upcoming Spanish Presidency has an important task ahead in ensuring that Lisbon comes to mean something concrete and is not just words on paper. The situation is precisely as the Council’s acting president admits: Work is not progressing sufficiently fast to maintain the rate of change. If you listen to Mr Barón Crespo, you understand that the social democrats in Europe are not having such an easy time of it at the moment. The European economy flagging is no reason to stop the reform. Instead one has to put in more effort to be able to achieve competitiveness and increased wellbeing. I have two questions for the Council’s acting president. One point in the conclusions addresses the upcoming WTO negotiations, and I concur with that stated. I would therefore like to repeat the question which was dismissed last time as being far too national, and which concerns the Tobin tax. Has the presidency any view on the Tobin tax or shall we interpret the Swedish ministers’ publicly consorting with the Attac movement as indicating their position on an international tax on currency transactions? My second question concerns enlargement. It has been said that the enlargement negotiations are progressing and are one of the most urgent priorities of the presidency. Will you succeed with your goals? What is actually meant by a ‘political breakthrough’ in the negotiations? Will the presidency at the summit in Gothenburg be able to state the EU’s point of view on the sensitive and difficult areas remaining so that the negotiations and a conclusion to them will become possible for the most successful candidate countries during 2001?

Political group: PPE-DE