Mr President, with less passion than the previous speaker, but with at least as much conviction, I would like to say that I feel a sense of frustration over the way in which the Intergovernmental Conference is developing. I feel this sense of frustration firstly because I believe that we have lost the spirit of the Convention, which consisted of seeking the best for the future of the Europe of 25, and my respected friend, Mr Pasqua, recalled Lenin when he said that facts are stubborn. What is more, they really are, because those governments which have to approve the Constitution had a presence in the Convention and actively participated in it, and I believe that nobody should go against their own actions. I feel frustration, Mr President, because I have the feeling that we are going to see over the coming days an attempt to reopen all the issues dealt with in the Convention. The Italian Presidency has sent a proposal telling the governments what has to be dealt with in the Convention. The response has been 150 pages of proposals to reopen almost all the issues that the Convention dealt with. There is also something entirely paradoxical, which is that certain formations of the Council of Ministers – such as the Ecofin Council – are also making proposals to revise the Constitution. The worst thing about these proposals, ladies and gentlemen, is that none of them are ambitious, none of them go further than the Constitutional text. They are cheapskate proposals. In reality, moreover, the Constitutional text could have been more ambitious. I will give an example of what I mean: Part IV, which refers to the revision of the constitutional text, was dealt with very little in the Convention, due to lack of time, and President Giscard d’Estaing even promised that we would discuss it after Thessaloniki. Well this has not happened. Here we have enormous scope for making specific proposals. There is no specific proposal in this regard, however. I also feel frustrated because the spirit of the Convention is a spirit of compromise, but compromise by blocks. But I notice that there are proposals, for example, which seek to reform the budgetary procedure. But this cannot be dealt with separately. It forms a package with the financial perspectives and with own resources. And if we, as the European Parliament, accept the package, we cannot accept now that one part should be left as it is and that the agreement on the budgetary procedure should be broken. I therefore believe that the Intergovernmental Conference must concentrate on genuinely political issues, which have not yet been resolved, on which there is no consensus between the governments and which are very simple: the presidency of the Council and the rotating presidencies, the weighting of votes and the distribution of seats in the European Parliament and the number of Commissioners. Constructive proposals – and I would urge the Italian Presidency to make some – must be presented en bloc and must not be piecemeal. I have therefore once again failed to understand today – and I say this because I am concerned – the speech by the President of the Commission when he says that the weighting of votes is very good, but that, on the other hand, the number of Commissioners must be changed. We cannot accept the parts of proposals that we want and reject the rest. We will have to seek a compromise solution and I hope that the Italian Presidency will do so and do so quickly. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE