The Commission’s draft and more so the Council’s draft EU budget for 2000 are marked by their austerity and drastic cuts, even in relation to the decisions reached at the European Council meeting in Berlin. Budget 2000 is an austerity budget with drastic cuts in agricultural, structural and social expenditure. It is a budget tailor made to the Stability Pact and to the drastic cuts imposed on Member States both within and outside the euro zone. The victims of this policy are the public at large, workers, farmers, artisans, young people and women. In the agricultural section of the budget, it is evident that even before the start of the multilateral negotiations of the World Trade Organisation, the EU wishes to join forces with the Americans and reduce protection and intervention by reducing the funds allocated to individual agricultural products. In turn, this will entail further cuts in producers’ income and further restrictions on farming. What is particularly worrying is the fact that, alongside the reduction in support expenditure for agricultural product markets, there is also an increase in and systemisation of expenditure under the second pillar of the CAP intended to wipe out small and medium-sized farmers. We have noted a reduction in the Structural Funds, which proves that the heroic declarations to iron out social and regional inequalities were merely rabble-rousing tactics. The same goes for the exceptionally limited social expenditure which is oriented not towards reducing unemployment or improving workers’ lives, but towards facilitating measures to upset working relations. We wish to denounce the efforts to activate the appropriations allocated to Turkey within the framework of the Customs Union and for the promotion of Euro-Turkish relations. We are equally against the tabling of proposals to approve the necessary appropriate legal bases, when it is a well-known fact that the human rights situation in Turkey has showed no signs of improvement, that the same policy is still being pursued on the Kurdish question and that Turkey is still occupying a large part of Cyprus. We also wish to condemn the hypocrisy of the EU on the Kosovo issue. On the one hand, it has totally destroyed the area with its unprovoked and criminal attacks on Yugoslavia and, on the other hand, it is now bending over backwards with its restructuring endeavours, without prejudice of course, while at the same time demanding that the perfectly legitimate government and the President of the country be overthrown. Despite the report’s containing certain positive individual amendments, it embraces the restrictive and unacceptable agreements reached in Berlin on Agenda 2000. It would be naïve of us to expect a different approach from the bodies of the EU, when both the community budget and national budgets have to operate within the unpopular and austere framework of the Maastricht criteria with tight cutbacks in public finances. It would be naïve to expect a different approach when the external policy of the EU is marked by crass hypocrisy, oppressive controls and the ever-increasing subjugation of countries, not to mention open and multiple intervention in their own internal affairs, as is the case with the enlargement process and the Stability Pact for south-eastern Europe. For these reasons, we shall once again be voting against the draft budget.

Political group: GUE-NGL