Maria João Rodrigues (S&D). – Madam President, I would like to say to President Tusk that we have indeed a serious situation when it comes to the European Council not being able to deliver real solutions to the problems we are confronted with. We do, of course, have many external challenges but something that we know for sure is that we need to strengthen internal cohesion among Europeans and the recipe for this is very clear. We need to address social inequalities by fully implementing the social pillar and we need to support investment into the future.

We still do not have all the necessary means. At the heart of this you have a historic task, which is to complete, reform and rebalance the economic and monetary union. We have all the proposals on the table. We need the political will to complete the banking union, to reform the European Stability Mechanism and to create a budget capacity in the euro area in order to support Member States to invest in the future.

Let me give you a concrete case. I come from Portugal, which is recognised today as a country which is making a real effort to go beyond blind austerity and to make a real recovery and a real effort to change. But now we are stuck. We cannot go forward unless the economic and monetary union is properly reformed. These kinds of cases must be supported because, if they are not supported, you will start having cases like Italy in other places in Europe. This is the choice that the European Council is confronted with. Either we support countries which want to move ahead with social cohesion and turn to the future or we will have a fragmentation of the European Union. The choice is there on the table of the next European Council in December.