Madam President, Mr President of the European Council, Mr President of the Commission, ladies and gentlemen, Mr President of the European Council, our Group welcomes your presence here today. If you attend plenary after the Gothenburg Summit, as we naturally hope you will, you will have been here three times. That is a good sign. I hope that future presidencies will follow your example. But do not rejoice too quickly; we still have a few words of criticism. But first let me stress once again how delighted we are that you are here. We also understand that your presence here – albeit after three months – is the first time you personally will have been involved in the sort of dialogue with the groups of the European Parliament that your foreign minister and Mr Danielsson have already engaged in. But, hopefully, today marks the start for you. You still have plenty of opportunity in the remaining three months to implement what Sweden stands for, namely transparency. We are, in fact, in the process of negotiating access to documents. Please do something, take charge in the Council so that we achieve a Parliamentary-friendly result, by which I mean a result in the Council which satisfies Parliament. Please do something in this regard. (Applause) The Stockholm Summit – like the Lisbon Summit – used very ambitious language, language which I find somewhat over the top. A little more modesty would do us good. We hear talk of the Union as the most competitive and dynamic science-based economic area in the world. When you choose such ambitious words, then you must expect to be judged by your actions. You yourself said crucially that you regret the fact that the postal services and energy markets have not been liberalised and that no date has been set for any such liberalisation. I say to you quite frankly that this was only because a certain Member State, namely France, did not want a date and the Federal Republic of Germany followed suit. It is a partnership of negation and blockade! That is not how we see the Franco-German partnership. It should not be used to block things, it should be used to move Europe forward and that is what I call on the governments of France and Germany to do. (Applause) Mr President of the European Council, you are not perceived as someone who is particularly fond of the Community method. On the contrary, you prefer intergovernmental collaboration. But this is precisely what happens when we rely solely on intergovernmental collaboration rather than the Community method! We get blockades. And it is the small countries which suffer in the end, because the large countries take Europe over, not forward. (Applause) We are absolutely delighted that progress has been made on the question of the investment market and financial services. We are grateful for your commitment, but we also say quite openly – and this is directed at both the Council and the Commission – that we expect the legislative rights of the European Parliament to be safeguarded and for it to be suitably involved in future legislative decisions. We shall insist on this and these remarks are addressed to both institutions, the Council and the Commission. A word of criticism on the question of foreign policy problems, Mr President of the European Council. Yesterday, the widow of Andrey Sakharov, Yelena Bonner, visited our Group. Just as she arrived, news came in that the last free television station in Russia had been nationalised. That is totally unacceptable as far as we are concerned. The freedom of the press and media is one of the principles of democracy, in both the European Union and Russia. What the President of Russia, Mr Putin – whom I am glad you invited – said in front of the television cameras about Chechnya, was an insult both to the people of Chechnya and the dignity of the human race. We would have welcomed an immediate contradiction from you in front of the media! (Applause) We take developments in Russia very seriously because, like you, we believe that stability in 21st century Europe depends on having a strong European Union which can act, on the one hand, and a stable – hopefully democratic – Russia, on the other. Russia is not symbolised solely by the pretty town of St. Petersburg, I agree with you there. The Russia of the future will also be symbolised by respect for democracy, freedom of the press and human rights and we must make that perfectly clear to the Russian leadership. I should like to address a further point, namely developments in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. I am delighted that the High Representative, Javier Solana, Commissioner Patten and the foreign minister of Sweden, Anna Lindh, as President-in-Office, are making this a focal point of their work and that – despite all the institutional complications which this entails – they are clearly all working well together. But that is not the point right now. The acid test, namely whether or not we help to bring about peace and stability, will be in the former Yugoslavia. If we fail there, we might as well give up any claim to involvement in world politics! We must set out our priorities in Europe, especially in the former Yugoslavia. That brings me to my final point. The American President, George W. Bush, will be with you in Gothenburg. Our Group is a close friend and partner of the United States of America and always has been. And that being so, we feel bound to tell our American allies that we cannot accept America’s refusal to abide by the Kyoto protocol. We criticise this as emphatically as we know how. We agree when America demands burden sharing in security and defence policy and for Europe to do more. But burden sharing also applies to environmental protection. We cannot leave a few countries to shoulder the responsibility while others shrug it off. Burden sharing also applies to environmental policy. (Applause) I should like to encourage you to speak out loud and clear: we stand for Europe and our values. If you are again successful – in Gothenburg hopefully even more so than in Stockholm – then we shall all benefit from the success. I wish this success on both you and us. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE