Brussels, 13/02/2004 (Agence Europe) - At its February plenary, the Committee of the Regions of the EU (CoR) elected German Christian Democrat Peter Straube as its President for the next two years. The President of the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg will take over from British Labour politician Albert Bore. Straube has been a member of the CoR since 1997 and has sat on the Institutional Affairs Committee and the Social and Economic Policy Committee. Albert Bore was elected First Vice-President of the CoR until 2006. Presenting his programme, Peter Straube said he would like to help strengthen the CoR's political role and improving its standing in the decision-making process. With enlargement, the CoR will have 95 new members on 1 May, commented Straube, insisting that the European Constitution be adopted, preferably under the Irish Presidency. If the identity of communities and regions is respected, citizens will feel close to Europe, which is why we need a strong, respected CoR as a spokesperson for regional authorities and a defender of subsidiary, he explained.
After the presentation of the Third Cohesion Report by Commissioner Michel Barnier (see EUROPE of 13 February, p.7), the members of the Committee of the Regions gave their full support to its proposals and thanked Barnier for his battle to defend cohesion.
On the Commission's draft Financial Perspectives for 2007-2013 (see EUROPE of 11 February, p.7), Michel Barnier told the CoR that it was the Commission's response to the political commitments made by the EU and to what the heads of state called for when they decided in favour of enlargement. It also responds to the Lisbon and Gothenburg Strategies and the need to make citizenship and justice an EU priority and make the EU's action abroad more effective. The suggested maximum amount is realistic and ambitious, he said, and allows these priorities to be met.
Speaking on behalf of the EPP group at the CoR, Isidoro Gottardo (Italy) said the Commission's draft Financial Perspectives would enable cohesion policy to rely on a sufficient financial basis to ensure convergence, competitiveness and coordination among the regions of Europe. Gottardo said that along with the President of the EPP-ED group at the European Parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering, written to President Prodi to support Barnier's proposals concerning cohesion. Similar views were expressed by the PES group, whose President Michel Delebarre (France) said that with its draft Financial Perspectives, the European Commission was able to respond in a responsible fashion to the challenges of the European project. Delebarre said that he too, along with the President of the PES group at the European Parliament Enrique Baron, had sent Prodi and the rest of the College a letter expressing both support for the draft budget close to the upper limit of 1.24% of GNI and also the strongest opposition to any form of renationalising of regional policy. Delebarre and Baron also point out in their letter that the aim of social, economic and territorial cohesion comes under Article 3 of the draft European Constitution and means that every EU region will be able to assert its own competitiveness.
They say this means that alongside financial support for the regions whose GDP is less than 75% of the EU average (the EU with 25 member states) and for regions affected by the statistical changes of enlargement, a new Objective 2 will be needed to support European regions in the direction of competitiveness and employment. The President of the Liberal group, Harry Dijksma (of the Netherlands), said that solidarity across the Member States must remain the starting point of stability in the EU. The Liberal group is also wholly opposed to renationalisation of the regional question and unanimously rejects the proposal by six Member States to set an upper limit on the EU budget in the future of 1% of GNI, explained Dijksma, adding that this is why local and regional elected representatives are insisting that their governments change their position.
Irma Pellinen (PES, Finland) asked how the draft Financial Perspectives would actually translate into practice in the different Member States. Irene Oldfather (PES, UK) stressed the importance of improving the connection between competition policy and coherence policy. Michaël Schneider (EPP, Germany) said that the CAP was moving ever more in the direction of a rural development policy. Martin Tesarik (the Czech Republic) thanked Commissioner Barnier for the EU's solidarity to his country following the floods last summer Claudio Martini (PES, Italy) praised the 'architecture' of the Commission's proposals and stressed the need to work in close collaboration with the different governments to put the cohesion chapters into practice.
Coming back after the debate, Commissioner Barnier said that a very concrete, visible cohesion policy would help form a different image of the EU, not a bureaucratic image but a human one. He said that setting an upper limit on the budget of 1% of GNI is not realistic and added that the Commission's proposals arrived at 1.15% compared with the upper limit of 1.24%. This means we are in the middle, he said, which is realistic and can be explained to people.