euro|topics - Poland is blocking the revival of the European Constitution

Main focus of Thursday, June 14, 2007

Poland is blocking the revival of the European Constitution

Poland is threatening to block agreement in the dispute about the EU constitutional treaty in a bid to achieve a larger share of the vote within the EU. European politicians - among them French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Austria's Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer and German Chancellor Angela Merkel - are making intense efforts to persuade Poland to give up its position before the EU summit on June 21.

Gazeta Wyborcza - Poland

In an extended interview with Wyborcza publishers Adam Michnik and Jarosław Kurski held shortly before his visit to Poland today, French President Nicolas Sarkozy tried to convince Poland to give up its blockade against an agreement on the EU constitution: "I come as a friend and European to friends and Europeans, to say: we must save Europe together to overcome this lethargy... You are a large country and must work together with Europe's other large countries. One of Europe's larger nations can't just say: I have less responsibility, I will block an agreement. This is why two days before the presidential elections I was the only candidate to say that, if I won, there would be no referendum on the constitution. That was difficult, but I did it because I am convinced that France can't block the EU. And Poland can't block the EU either." (14/06/2007)

Die Presse - Austria

"In the debate over a new European constitution Warsaw has now deprived itself of all room for manoeuvre," writes Wolfgang Böhm, after Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Gusenbauer left Warsaw yesterday without having made any progress. "Kaczynski & Kaczynski may still be enjoying the procession of leading European politicians knocking on their door, but they still haven't found any partners. With the exception of Prague's particularly Europsceptic president, Vaclav Klaus, none of the EU politicians are willing to renegotiate the distribution of power stipulated in the EU constitutional treaty, which Warsaw has criticised. The Kaczynskis are the only ones to insist that their influence on EU decisions should grow while Germany's is reduced." (14/06/2007)

Süddeutsche Zeitung - Germany

The newspaper's Poland correspondent Thomas Urban contends that the Kaczynski brothers are not anti-European. "The twins are just trying to achieve two goals within the EU: firstly, they want Poland to become very strong and secondly, they want Germany to be as weak as possible. One can hardly criticise the former: every country wants to strengthen its position. But the second is problematic. After all, you can hardly formulate this goal openly. So in Warsaw they've dug up a formula that was long ago rejected for the EU constitutional treaty: the voting mechanism should not be based on the number of a country's inhabitants but on the square root of that number. Polish Foreign Minister Anna Fotyga openly proclaims the goal of this complicated arithmetical problem: the aim is to end 'German hegemony' within the EU because this would halve Germany's influence on decision-making processes." (14/06/2007)

Financial Times - United Kingdom

Jan Cienski in Warsaw and Bertrand Benoit in Berlin analyse Poland's criticism of EU voting strengths, which looms large over next week's summit. "[In Germany] many believe that Poland has replaced the UK as the main obstacle to putting the constitution back on track. ... Poland insists that the constitution's double majority voting system for the EU Council of Ministers, under which laws would be passed if supported by at least 55 % of the EU's 27 member states and covering at least 65 % of its population, is unfair and biased towards its largest members. ... Poland insists that its proposal, under which each country would have as many votes as the square root of its population, ... is fairer to small and medium-sized countries. ... the German argument is that re-weighting the voting system is only one aspect of broader compromise extending to the European Parliament ... and the extension of qualified majority voting to new policy areas." (14/06/2007)

» To the complete press review of Thursday, June 14, 2007

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