Reinhard Bütikofer (Verts/ALE). – Mr President, I would like to thank the Prime Minister for the remarks he made with regard to our foreign and security policy. I was very happy to hear what I considered an extremely realistic approach.

I have two questions on the basis of what you said, Prime Minister. Number one: when you emphasise the necessity for Europeans to take a shared initiative, to carry a bigger part of the burden of making sure that we can contribute to our own security, then we should also look to the fact that we’re not spending too little at the moment, but we are spending in a very ineffective way. We’re duplicating, triplicating and quadruplicating all our defence expenditure. The focus should be on making effective measures our number one priority and not just raising expenditure, without being more effective.

The second question I have for you, Prime Minister, is very simple: are you in favour of abandoning the unanimity rule on foreign policy?