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PES in Porto: the view from the Congress floor
12 articles
Ecrit par Jon Worth
CV : I'm 26, resident in London, and am a member of the Labour Party. I'm also an active blogger (blog.jonworth.eu) and freelance website designer. I've been fascinated by EU politics for a number of years; I'm presently working to rejuvenate the Labour Movement for Europe in the UK, and have previously worked in Brussels. English is my mother tongue, but I'm happy to enter into dialogue here in French, German or Italian too.
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Activists at the PES Congress: some preliminary conclusions - 08-12-2006 20:44:48 - Il faut être connecté pour poster un commentaire. Veuillez vous identifier ou vous enregistrer ici
The PES Congress in Porto has steadily drawing to a close; the fringe meetings are over, and the final session is about to start. So what are the overall impressions, and what should happen now?
First and foremost it has been a fascinating experience to be present here. I do not understand or necessarily appreciate all of the dynamics of an event like this. The relentless pursuit of consensus - often to the detriment of the quality of the content - of the political debates was striking. However the opportunity to hear speeches from such a range of high level politicians and have the freedom to write my observations about those has been very welcome.
Secondly, the role of the PES Activists remains extremely unclear after the 2 days here. It seems that we are at best tolerated here. We pay our own travel, we don’t even get any food in the conference centre, and we of course have no political representation in any of the decision making structures. Yet as a group of politically motivated, committed and experienced people that is not a status quo that the Activists are going to be happy living with in the medium term. The very nature of party political activism - especially on the centre-left - is the wish to change things, make things better, gain influence.
The network of activists also needs to reflect on its role and responsibility. Influence is not only something you get, it something you work hard for. We need to make sure that the activist network contributes to a good european debate, organises interesting activities and must not be exclusive. It is up to us as PES activists to reach out and recruit more activists - among members of the member parties, but why not also among the public, with universities as an excellent place to start.
Europe is ever more diverse, so our party political structures must be more diverse and flexible too. Porto has been a good start for the PES Activists. But we’ll be back in 2 years at the next congress: more demanding, more committed, more organised - there’s no doubt about that. -
Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, leader of the PES - 08-12-2006 14:40:02 - Il faut être connecté pour poster un commentaire. Veuillez vous identifier ou vous enregistrer ici
Poul was re-elected as leader of the PES in Porto. This has allowed him to make plenty of speeches on the podium. It’s the first time I have seen Rasmussen perform in the flesh, and he’s actually quite impressive. He comes across as honest, as expressive, and almost emotional in his means of delivery. He also has a tendency to move around lot, and wave his hands left and right. You almost feel he might suddenly break into a Saturday Night Fever dance routine. Have a look at this animation and see what you think.
He’s also intensely personal; his grandson Lukas has featured at least a couple of times in his speeches. Little Lukas, we are assured, will be protected by the new REACH legislation that Martin Schultz and the Socialist Group in the European Parliament have worked on.
So well done Poul. I’m sat in Porto like this in large part thanks to him. It was his determination to get PES Activists running that allows me to even be here and write this. Let’s hope that in 2 years time, with more work from Rasmussen, PES Activists is even stronger, even better. -
Royal in Porto: the anglophone press doesn't care - 08-12-2006 11:52:55 - Il faut être connecté pour poster un commentaire. Veuillez vous identifier ou vous enregistrer ici
A quick check of Google News this morning maybe explains why Ségolène Royal's speech yesterday was 100% in French. Searching Google News - French Version - for 'Ségolène Royal' gives more than 20 articles about her speech in Porto, with titles such as 'Ségolène Royal ovationnée au Portugal' - do the search here . Compare that to the English version of Google news - not a single article appears. Try the search here . Trying a search for PES Porto or PES Congress in Google News does not give any better results.
Beyond that, the blogosphere is not really buzzing with debate about the Congress - my posts here are the only ones listed in Technorati and Google Blogsearch . -
Party politics: what's going on in Poland? - 07-12-2006 18:39:29 - Il faut être connecté pour poster un commentaire. Veuillez vous identifier ou vous enregistrer ici
The Polish government has been roundly criticised for its stance on a number of EU issues recently - the veto of the EU-Russia Treaty for example. I had perhaps naively assumed that the problems stemmed largely from the positions of the Law & Justice Party that is currently predominant in Warsaw, or at least those on the right of Polish politics.
However, while sat here at the PES Activists’ introductory meeting earlier on, it became clear that the euroscepticism is more all-pervasive in and systematised in Polish politics. It is currently impossible for any non-Polish citizen to join any Polish political party - it is prohibited by law! This is absolutely ludicrous. I wonder whether this is in any way contrary to European law? Or have parties been so scared about European integration that party politics has somehow managed to escape the rules that apply to everything else? Can someone enlighten me in the comments? Perhaps the PES should work to do something to right these sorts of anomalies. -
Royal’s speech needs polish, and some better policies too - 07-12-2006 17:33:20 - Il faut être connecté pour poster un commentaire. Veuillez vous identifier ou vous enregistrer ici
Somehow the hopes of a continent’s Social Democrats seem to be embodied by Ségolène Royal. She gives a reason for hope that somehow a different politics is possible, that the French PS can emerge from the shadows, that the centre-left can re-assume its place as the predominant political family in Europe. There’s a hope that somehow she can replace Blair as the darling of the left, a vacuum left since the Third Way / Neue Mitte euphoria of the late 1990s.
Yet from my standpoint, Royal’s speech was disappointing, not least in terms of the way it was delivered. Royal was clearly reading throughout, and her style of delivery was rather flat.
Then there is the issue of what was said. There were only 2 ‘policies’ that really struck me in Royal’s speech. The first was an idea that PES leaders should agree a political delcaration before each European Council, as an important political statement of intent; probably not really a major step forward.
The second suggestion was that more political control is needed over the policies of the European Central Bank. I wonder what the German SPD representatives here - brought up in the era of Bundesbank independence - would have made of that?
Last but not least, Royal was the only main speaker not to utter a single word in their non-native language, and she also made no reference to the presence of Howard Dean in the audience, something that both Poul and José had mentioned. Strategically that might be the right approach for French politics, yet in the context of this Congress it feels a little out of place. -
Technical Issues - 07-12-2006 15:20:25 - Il faut être connecté pour poster un commentaire. Veuillez vous identifier ou vous enregistrer ici
So much for citizen journalism. So much for the Lisbon Process that Europe should be the world's most dynamic knowledge-based economy by 2010. In short, it is proving quite hard to blog from the Congress here. I can manage to get an unreliable WLAN connection in the room with the display stands, yet in the seminar rooms and main conference hall there's only a password-protected PES network to which I have been given no access. There are plenty of things that I would like to report, but the technology is letting me down at present.
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