theparliament.com - Margot Wallström comments on "working with the EU Parliament and communicating about the EU-Constitution"

Margot Wallström, European commission vice-president for institutional relations and communication strategy
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Margot Wallström comments on "working with the EU Parliament and communicating about the EU-Constitution"

"One of my most important tasks, to work with the parliament and the other institutions. I think that this task is sometimes not so visible, it’s not something that we keep on selling but I think it’s important to recall what we’ve been doing and what the overall achievements are. First of all we started by establishing a new framework agreement but we’ve also managed to solve some of those long lasting difficult questions like comitology. We have made a lot of effort to improve the political dialogue between the commission and the parliament and I can recall over 30 meetings between commissioners and committees. Of course it is not perfect yet, but it means that our dialogue has become much more political.

On the dialog about the Constitution Mrs. Wallström noted:" Following the French and Dutch referendum no's we found that you cannot just come back with some constitutional engineering. We could see instead that there was something lacking and something missing, namely debate and engagement with citizens to explain why we need a constitution and to go even further, it’s not only restricted to the constitution but really to be able to discuss the future of Europe. And so we said what’s needed is more debate and dialogue. I asked my services to check for example how often our website is used and we’ve had over one million hits and 16,000 contributions for the debate on Europe. We have had over 1000 events and a call for proposals involving NGO’s and citizen’s projects and there are really good projects coming out of this. Six of these are big cross-border projects."