Parliament President , with the discreet support of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt . She secured a majority in the third round of voting .
For Simone Veil , being elected President of the European Parliament was the culmination of a lifelong struggle .
The day after Veil ’ s death , Sylvie Kaufmann wrote that she was part of ‘ this impressive Franco-German generation who dared to build the Europe of hope on the still smoking ruins of the Second World War ’ 3 , at the same time recalling the life ’ s journey of Chancellor Helmut Kohl , who had passed away several days earlier , and who had also been a great architect of Europe .
As Simone Veil pointed out during the 1979 European election campaign , ‘ of the peoples of Europe , the most European are those who have endured the greatest suffering ’ 4 . She was certainly thinking of the Jews who survived the Holocaust but also undoubtedly of the German members of her audience who , early in their lives , had experienced the loss of close relatives at the same time as that of their country ’ s honour .
In her inaugural speech on 17 July 1979 , she did not forget the Spanish , the Portuguese or the Greeks , recently liberated from dictatorships , stating that ‘ the Community will be happy to receive them ’. A fervent advocate of European enlargement , she would not fail to think later , after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 , of the peoples of eastern Europe . She felt that those living in western Europe , who had been ‘ lucky … to live in a free system ... when the Iron Curtain closed off the other half of Europe ’ had taken on a kind of debt towards those in the East . ‘ When history gave us
3 . S . Kaufmann , Le Monde , 1 July 2017 . 4 . Le Nouvel Observateur , 5 March 1979 .
50