Let's get down to work. With May's European elections, European politics entered a new phase. For the first time, pan-European 'Spitzenkandidaten' - lead candidates proposed by the biggest political families in the European parliament - presented themselves to voters across our continent. This process will forever change the landscape of European politics. It will politicise the European level and open up a lasting contest of ideas and concepts of how the EU should be shaped in the future.
The European parliament, having long emancipated itself from its beginnings as an advisory assembly, now assumes a central role for such a European-wide debate. It is a debate that is badly needed. The 'Euro crisis' we experienced over the last few years - though having different root causes in different member states - demonstrated that we all sit in the same boat. It opened up, across our continent, a deep and lasting discussion over the future of Europe, centred on the question of how to pull our continent out of its economic slump.
The EPP group, having shaped most national reform programmes and EU-based solutions to find an end to what is by now a prolonged debt and economic crisis, came out as the clear winner of May's European elections. The EPP is the party of responsibility and of lasting solutions, having campaigned on a reform platform: the pledge to renew the European Union, and enabling it to meet the challenges of the next five years.
Given the scope of the challenges we face - a whole generation in some member states virtually cut off from long-term employment prospects, and the need to ensure stability and security in our immediate neighbourhood such as Ukraine or the Mediterranean - Europe has no time for institutional navel-gazing.
This is the main message voters sent with the election result: sit down and work. It is now up to us to heed this call and start delivering. It is up to us to start work in order to make Europe safer and retain our prosperity. This is why the EPP group, united behind its candidate for European commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, wants to put the debate about faces behind us. We need Jean-Claude Juncker as commission president, in order to be able to concentrate on the content of the next commission's work programme.
Last week, the EPP group drew up its priorities for the next European commission centred around policy proposals to improve Europe's competitiveness in order to enhance economic growth and create new jobs especially for the young generation. In addition, the EPP is the political group most strongly pushing to cut red-tape, building on the work of the EPP-led high-level working group. In order to generate new growth, we need to liberate the potential of small and medium-sized companies, and complete the single market, especially in the area of the digital economy. While online business has entered phase 2.0, or even 3.0, many national barriers remain, including the fragmentation in data protection rules.
We want to bring these policy priorities into discussions with other political groups in order to create a stable majority for the next five years, a majority of reform that can rebuild the trust of Europe's citizens and meet their expectations.
Strengthening the democratic grounding and transparency of European decision making processes by electing the winner of the European elections, Jean-Claude Juncker as new commission president will be the first step. Above all, it will allow us to take that crucial second step: get to work.