We are at a time when a strategy defined in the year 2000 - the Lisbon Strategy - is coming to an end. This strategy made a decisive commitment to job creation and to achieving total employment by the year 2010.
It's clear that the first thing we must do is to admit that the good intentions of the Lisbon Strategy have been shattered as a result of a deep, global and international crisis.
This doesn't mean we have to say the Lisbon Strategy has not done any good, it has been positive, but the crisis has thwarted one of its prime objectives.
The discussion now must be aimed at drawing up the programmatic lines for the 2020 Strategy, in a special way and focused on two areas:
The first one is the economic measures for getting us out of the crisis, and the second is how we will ensure that the 2020 Strategy also sets some specific conditions in terms of creating employment, enough good-quality employment to absorb all those people who have lost what is most important to a person during this crisis - their job.
We will work hard to draw conclusions that will allow us to carry on evolving and we are confident that the 2020 Strategy will have been approved before the end of the Spanish Presidency, and that the approved version will include the goal of employment, and the promise that the EU will not backtrack on what has historically been the badge of its identity - the Welfare State.

Quality employment in Europe will go hand-in-hand with the pattern of growth we want. It is clear that the crisis isn't neutral, and that it will change the very economy itself. There will be a before and an after to this crisis.
And we already get the idea that a commitment is being made to an economic future more firmly based on innovation, knowledge and training.
It is obvious that these three elements must form the basis for the jobs of the future, and this means that in future those jobs that are related to these elements will undoubtedly be of good quality.
Europe must make a decisive commitment to training, because people excluded from access to work in the future will be those who have not received the basic education required to be able to apply for the kinds of work to be created in the future.

When there is an economic crisis, the most important thing is not to allow social policy to fall by the wayside. Some people may theorise that one of the ways of getting out of this crisis is to rely more on the market and to reduce social protection.
If anyone expresses this position, Spain will not champion it. It will do quite the opposite - it will spearhead the position that Europe cannot allow any backtracking on the Welfare State.
And there are general elements within the Welfare State that different features in each country, but which are common to the Union as a whole. The right to a decent pension, access to healthcare, something which is essential and necessary in order to guarantee the health of all citizens, regardless of their economic conditions, and free access to education - these are the three basic pillars that support the central arch of the European Welfare State.
And, without any doubt, Europe is building a fourth pillar, which is caring for people. This is developing faster in some European countries than in others. But these are the four basic elements of the future of Europe. And they have served as a model in the globalised world - and we have to safeguard this.

In a globalised world we tend to think that the entire economy revolves around large multinationals, which are those that get the most media coverage and are best known. In Europe, however, the economy is not run by multinationals, but by small and medium-sized enterprises.
Europe has always been a favourable environment for entrepreneurs, and Europe's progress has been thanks to those entrepreneurs, and this strength.
Entrepreneurs come up with great ideas and wonderful concepts, but what they often lack is the minimum of resources needed to make them a reality.
And this is where we have to establish an area of work to ensure that microloans are in place, and that the financial system will make them available to those people so that those with good ideas and good projects can always put them into practice, rather than shelving them because of a lack of basic funding.

Yes, the idea is that, in the same way as many programmes have been set up to support training, infrastructure improvement or the environment, we should look for ways of supporting programmes that aim to help self-employed entrepreneurs through microloans.

There is a discussion about maternity leave, and the number of days or weeks that people have a right to, and we must try to ensure these rights are increasingly standardised within the EU, phasing out differences between countries.
Another more complex issue is that of displaced workers. The courts have ruled that there can and must be freedom of movement for workers. The problem is that workers who have been displaced from one country or another have done so at the salary in their country of origin, which leads to unfair competition in terms of labour costs.
The Nordic countries have suggested that this situation must be resolved, and Spain is in agreement with this. We believe people should get the same pay for the same job, and what we need to do is to ensure compatibility in workers' mobility, but to prevent any “social dumping” of workers as a result of the difference in salaries between countries.

• Video [Spanish]