Brussels, 12/10/2000 (Agence Europe) - Hans-Gert Poettering, President of the European Parliament's EPP/ED Group, told the press on Wednesday that he expected decisive impetus for the IGC of the informal European Council of Biarritz, and repeated that the main criteria for a successful institutional reform was the generalisation of qualified majority voting with, as corollary, EP co-decision (we also want co-decision for the Common Agricultural Policy, he recalled). In addition, saying that "small" Member States would agree to a re-weighting of votes in Council if they had the assurance that, in the European Commission, there would be one Commissioner per Member State, Mr. Poettering said that Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, who met the EPP/ED Group in Strasbourg last week, had said that his country "would never give up on having a European Commissioner. Our Group wants a strengthening of the President of the Commission, and of the European Commission as institution, Poettering added, who could, later, envisage the election of the President of the Commission. In addition, noting that currently the composition of the Commission did not reflect the outcome of the European elections, the CDU member considered that, in future, remedies would have to be sought for such a situation. We "wholeheartedly" reject the creation of "Secretariats", like that of a second chamber of the European Parliament, Poettering also declared. As for enhanced cooperation, he hoped that it could be organised in the Community framework, and welcomed the fact that the British Conservatives were also of that opinion.
According to the President of the EPP/ED Group, moreover, the Biarritz and Nice Summits should open the perspective of a pursuit of the reform in the EU after the conclusion of the current IGC, with a "new conference". I do not believe that the governments of the Member States have the "courage or the will" to reform the Council, and so nor should the method for post-Nice by that of an Intergovernmental Conference, but rather of the "Convention" bringing together governments, the European Parliaments, national parliaments and the Commission, as was the case for the Charter of Fundamental Rights", said Poettering. The aim of the exercise should in particular, according to him, be to strengthen the "parliamentary-dimension of the EU and the transparency of the Council, and, especially, to define the delimitation of powers at different levels in Europe; European, national, regional and local. In the definition of this catalogue of powers, there would need to be a certain amount of flexibility, as we cannot, in 2003-2004, "set something immutable for a century", Hans-Gert Poettering concluded.