Press Release

04/02/2004

XVIth EPP CONGRESS: European Election result must be respected. Wilfried Martens - Photos available

Speaking ahead of the opening of the two-day XVI EPP Party Congress in Brussels, President Wilfried MARTENS renewed the EPP's plea - reflected in the draft Constitution- to respect the results of the June European elections before naming a Commission President.

This was among the 27 or so resolutions to the EPP's Congress paper, Your Majority and Europe, "and probably the most important", Martens said. He commended the paper as "concrete and practical", the fruit of a year of debate between the 65 EPP parties. It reflected a new consensus about where Europe was going, he said.

Martens argued that only the EPP was in a position to put the Union back on track after the collapse of the IGC on the Constitution. The "noyau dur" of the EPP, its core, he said, remained entirely faithful to the Christian Democratic ideal of the common good, to personalism (commitment to the individual's human dignity), the social market economy, and a commitment to a decentralised federal Europe based on solidarity.

The EPP would be pressing the Irish Presidency to resolve the impasse on the Constitution by the time of the June elections, he said.

Martens robustly defended a draft resolution tabled by the EPP-ED Group in the European Parliament seeking to exclude leading former Communists from what was the Soviet Bloc from the European Institutions. "We in the EPP are opposed to extremes of Left and Right," he said.

The resolution is today being discussed and re-drafted by the Resolutions Committee prior to being presented to tomorrow's Congress plenary. Martens went on: "This is the first time a political group has expressed its clear rejection of left-wing extremists and totalitarian systems. Every democrat can accept that."

Further information, Beatriz Toribio, Tel. +32 475 480446