Does Parliament gain a lot of power in the new procedure?
The new procedure gives it real and full budgetary powers since it will have the final say over all expenditure headings. We are conscious of this but not everyone is. Parliament should be much more ambitious, in my view. For example, by showing that it can reject the budget even if the Council has approved it, as Alain Lamassoure has hinted? My role is to promote positive scenarios and not to speculate about negative scenarios. Alain Lamassoure is an elegant and responsible chair of the Committee on Budgets. He and his fellow committee members are aware that we are running without any margin in the budget. Today we are seeing, after several years, that in many areas financing has not been up to the ambitions of the European Union. This is the case for innovation, competitiveness, new programmes like Galileo, or Europe as a global player. What do you think of Parliament’s request to increase its human and budgetary resources to adapt to Lisbon? I know that it is an unpopular request bu
