Verbatim report of proceedings

Monday, 24 October 2011 - Strasbourg

11. Order of business

  President. – The final draft agenda, as drawn up pursuant to Rule 137 of the Rules of Procedure by the Conference of Presidents at its meeting of Thursday, 20 October 2011, has been distributed. The following changes have been proposed:

[Tuesday]:

I have received a request from the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance for a new item, Council and Commission statements on the state of play of the negotiations of the European Council concerning the economic crisis, to be added to tomorrow’s agenda at 15.00. Could the Greens please present this request in more detail?

  Rebecca Harms, on behalf of the Verts/ALE Group. – (DE) Mr President, I feel – and we have also tried to agree this quickly among the group chairs – that, following this sombre weekend in Brussels, Parliament cannot bow out of the debate on a solution to the crisis and that we should not wait to see whether or not we are informed on Thursday, but that we must urgently intervene once more.

I spent the entire weekend in Brussels and tried to follow every phase of the decisions – and I find it bizarre that a summit that was postponed for fourteen days was unable to make basic decisions. Apparently, the more crisis summits we have, the less able we are to agree. The deeper the crisis is described and analysed, the deeper the political crisis becomes between the Heads of State or Government during the crisis summits.

Parliament’s position is very clear. It is important that we keep reiterating this position to the citizens of the European Union. European economic governance is a different thing entirely to these crisis summits.

That is why I believe that we should issue a statement ahead of this summit as part of an urgent and topical debate tomorrow afternoon.

  Hannes Swoboda, on behalf of the S&D Group. – (DE) Mr President, I believe it is very important that on Thursday, we not only find out the outcome – and I hope we will find it out after the summit has ended – but that we also reiterate Parliament’s position very clearly. I would like to suggest that we proceed as follows: to save time, we could arrange a round of group spokespeople so that the groups can say quite clearly what this is about, which would allow Parliament to send a clear message to the Council. That is something which I would support.

(Applause)

  President. – I understand – the request is now clear. It is also worded in a clear way. There will be a statement by the political groups one after another and, of course, opening with a statement by the Council and the Commission.

(Parliament agreed to the request)

Ladies and gentlemen, tomorrow’s agenda will be revised slightly. Tomorrow at 15.00, the beginning of discussions on particular items on the agenda will be moved. The additional debate we are planning will last approximately 45 minutes and all other items on the agenda will be deferred by this amount of time. This is not a major change to the agenda from the point of view of the time we have available tomorrow afternoon and evening. We are therefore adding this item and deferring the times of the other items on the agenda.

(The order of business was thus established)

  Astrid Lulling (PPE). – (FR) Mr President, my point concerns Tuesday’s order of business. The order of business includes an oral question on the Maternity Leave Directive. I am very surprised, because we adopted our report on this issue at first reading.

We are in the middle of the ordinary legislative procedure. During the ordinary legislative procedure, one does not submit to the Council questions in which one goes so far as to make concessions regarding the report we have adopted. I believe that we should not include this oral question in the order of business. If we do include it, we are showing the Council that we have completely failed to understand the ordinary legislative procedure and the Treaty of Lisbon.

  President. – Thank you, Ms Lulling, for that comment. We will look at that item carefully. This was a decision made at Thursday’s sitting of the Conference of Presidents, but we will look at where the problem lies. I will contact you personally to clarify this matter further.