Verbatim report of proceedings

Thursday, 14 September 2023 - Strasbourg

12.3. Parliamentarism, European citizenship and democracy (A9-0249/2023 - Alin Mituța, Niklas Nienass)

Oral explanations of vote

  Rainer Wieland, on behalf of the PPE Group. – Madam President, dear colleagues, on behalf of the EPP Group and its Vice-President responsible, Paolo Rangel, I want to give this explanation.

The EPP Group recognises the importance of the proposals to strengthen parliamentary democracy and citizens’ participation contained in this report. However, we also underline our reservations, mainly with the two following proposals.

First, granting the European Parliament scrutiny powers over the European Council as this represents a questionable understanding of the institutional role of both institutions, insufficiently taking into account the democratic legitimacy of elected representatives of Member States.

Second, the proposals for establishing a permanent European agora and EU-wide referendums, as we believe strengthening citizens participation cannot overthrow the principle of representative democracy.

  Ангел Джамбазки (ECR). – Г-жо Председател, без никаква изненада, отново против, убедено против този доклад. Цялото ми уважение към колегата Виланд, защото отново този доклад призовава за това да се премахне единодушието на Съвета, да се гласува с квалифицирани мнозинства, изобщо налага отново федералистката наднационална рамка, която да замества Европа такава, каквато е замислена от нейните бащи основатели. Такава, каквато е трябвало да бъде, Европа на свободните, суверенни отечества, която споделя единствено общ пазар и която работи за просперитет на своите граждани.

Няма как решенията да се вземат в Брюксел. Хората в този балон, в този стъклен балон в Брюксел, живеят извън живия живот. Те не виждат инфлацията, те налагат политики, които вдигат цените, те унищожават малкия и средния бизнес, те ликвидират средната класа в европейските държави и за всичко това се очаква да се реши, през това да се направи едно европейско наднационално правителство, излъчено от неизбрани от никой хора, налагащо лобистки политики, каквито са в ущърб на гражданите.

Категорично против! Това е вредно и това не трябва да се случва, защото противоречи на интереса на гражданите и на държавите - членки на Европейския съюз.

  Clare Daly (The Left). – Madam President, I too voted against this file because while there are a lot of general aspirations about making the EU more democratic, they were absolutely cancelled out by the call to get rid of consensus decision-making and to put in place a system of qualified majority voting, which is ruled by the big boys and is inherently anti-democratic.

You can dress it up all you like, but nothing really in this proposal is going to deal with the fundamental absence of democracy at EU level. How is it democratic that the current EU was roundly rejected in democratic referendums on an EU Constitution in 2005, but then repackaged and rammed through by EU elites in the Lisbon Treaty? Three years later, only Ireland got another referendum. But again, wrong answer, so do it all again! That’s so-called ‘democracy’.

Nobody voted for Ursula von der Leyen, yet she is supposedly the head of the EU. Elections or not, the truth is that actual democracy would require a hell of a lot more than its offered in this package.

  Mick Wallace (The Left). – Madam President, I too voted against it as giving the big boys more power than they have already is a disaster. The reforms proposed in this report are only scratching at the surface of the problem.

Is the EU a democracy? What started as an ideal has, through the decades, been muddied and garbled by right-wing neoliberal reforms and undemocratic Treaty change. We have deeply flawed institutions that are unanswerable, opaque and endlessly bureaucratic.

The place is run by lobbyists. We have 705 MEPs with 60 000 lobbyists in Brussels. My God! Most of them are hired by big industry trying to influence the decision making.

But what is democracy anyway? Do we ever ask ourselves that? Is it having a vote every five years? I don’t think so. Democracy is where the ordinary citizen would have a say in how his country, how his community is run. They don’t have it. We don’t even have local government. You couldn’t have it without local government.

Democracy is overrated as we know it, and we pretend we have it, but a really good example of that is that today 80% of the people have made clear in Europe that they want the war in Ukraine to end and they want peace rather than continuing to punish Russia, but 80% of the politicians across Europe want the war to continue and they want to continue to fuel it.

So who represents who? The politicians do not represent the citizens of Europe!

  President. – That concludes the explanations of vote.