EPP Group pays tribute to Leo Tindemans, a great EPP statesman and visionary European

"With Leo Tindemans’ death, we are losing a great EPP statesman, a visionary European who played a enormous role in shaping Europe’s future. His work on European integration is a source of inspiration for us and it is our duty to keep his European vision alive," said Manfred Weber MEP, Chairman of the EPP Group in the European Parliament.

A co-founder of the European People's Party in 1976, Leo Tindemans became its president from 1976 to 1985. Elected to the European Parliament several times, he also chaired the EPP Group from 1992 to 1994.

Tindemans' hugely influential Report on the European Union (1976), which the EEC’s December 1974 Summit asked him to write, earned him the lasting nickname of "Mr Europe". Defining "an integral concept of the European Union", the report was typical of the Tindemans style - a practical programme of small steps, reinforcing existing institutions relying on a solid transnational consensus.

Putting forward for the first time concepts that sound so familiar today - a "People's Europe" designed to usher in a European culture excluding no-one, an Economic and Monetary Union, a European Central Bank, a real Common Foreign and Security Policy - and giving more power to the European Parliament, the representative body of European citizens, and to the European Commission, the Tindemans Report indeed shaped the entire course of European integration.

"We are extremely grateful for Leo Tindemans’ enormous contribution to the construction of Europe. He will be dearly missed. We wish to extend our sincere condolences to the family of our former colleague and friend," concluded Manfred Weber MEP.