Agag Longo (PPE-DE). – (ES) Mr President, Mr President of the Commission, Madam President-in-Office of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to congratulate the presidency of the Council and the presidency of the Commission, who have always promoted this initiative, on taking up the Lisbon debate. This is an extremely important debate because less than a year ago we committed ourselves to nothing less than turning Europe into the most competitive and dynamic area of stability in the world. Nothing less than that. However, the 2010 horizon is looking stormy because the reticence of some countries to carry out liberalisation programmes approved by everybody and the resistance of States such as France to losing some of the flagships of its public sector are creating a two-speed Europe, a Europe in which countries which fulfil their collective commitments see their progress threatened by suspiciously aggressive strategies from companies, which are still public, in relation to recently liberalised sectors.

Ladies and gentlemen, a lot is at stake, but above all the legitimacy of the Community institutions is at stake in the eyes of the European citizens, who see the spread of a dangerous dynamic which favours the directors of powerful companies and which yields few results.

That is why I think Stockholm is so important. Stockholm must mark the beginning of a thorough debate on public participation in key industrial sectors. This debate must take place within the framework of a mutual process of evaluation and learning which will contribute to improving the operation of the single market. Based on a scoreboard of objective indicators for privatisation, this debate must bring together the different attitudes to the principles of competition, freedom of establishment and free movement of capital. This debate is being demanded by the European citizens who, having accepted competition as an effective method for allocating resources, are seeing their markets subjected to inefficiencies imported from countries which are ideologically allergic to economic reform.