Brussels, 05/12/2005 (Agence Europe) - Elected Members of the Belgian Socialist Party are missing the time when “Prodi dared”, even if they reproached him for it on occasion, as, for example, with the Pénélope Constitutional Project. Certainly, “Barroso communicates better, but he communicates spinelessly (…), to the extent of being the puppet of certain heads of government” and his offer of 50 million euro (in fact, merely a re-allocation of money already deployed) during the crisis in France's suburbs was “the height of simplistic demagogy”. This harsh judgment comes from Philippe Busquin, for whom the dominant characteristics of this Commission are “laissez aller and laissez faire”, with Commissioners like Kroes and Mandelson. With the exceptions of Louis Michel and Janez Potocnik, who are doing all they can, there are few of today's Commissioners who have a European vision, adds the father of the European Research Area who fears that the 7th framework programme will pay the cost of a poor Financial Perspectives agreement currently being prepared, he says, with the complicity of countries like Belgium who are ready to do anything as long as budgetary agreement is reached. Belgian Socialists are also preoccupied by the increasing power of the Vatican in the European Institutions, explained Philippe Busquin and Alain Hutchinson to a number of journalists. “The drift of President Barroso and the Commission towards the Catholic right” is very obvious, with its first major victim being the European Ethics Group, “censored by underhand methods”, complained Philippe Busquin. with clerical interference in political debate, the many religious services in European Parliament meeting rooms, extreme right Polish exhibitions prevented only at the last minute in the EP, Alain Hutchinson does not hesitate to declare that with enlargement, Parliament “has jumped backwards by a century”.