Poland is threatening to reopen a bitter dispute about European Union voting rights after the country’s prime minister claimed his country had been sold short at last week’s summit.Jaroslaw Kaczynski, prime minister, said the voting issue, which threatened to derail EU treaty talks at the Brussels summit, was not yet fully settled for Poland. “We have to finally resolve this issue at the intergovernmental conference” being held by the EU from next month, Mr Kaczynski said, when asked if he planned to fight for Poland’s interpretation of the deal.
The proposal risks further deepening rifts between Poland and the rest of the EU if it unpicks part of the painful compromise reached on a revised version of the EU constitution.
Senior European leaders warned that the matter was closed, but Mr Kaczynski said closer examination of the deal’s fine print suggested Poland had not been given what it wanted. The warning has dismayed José Socrates, Portugal’s prime minister, who assumes the EU presidency tomorrow and who has the task of finalising technical work on the Union’s reform treaty. Mr Socrates said Poland’s plan to reopen the deal appeared to be based on a misunderstanding. “The mandate is very clear and precise on what has to be done. I am sure this is only a misunderstanding,” he said.
But Mr Kaczynski said it was not a renegotiation but a question of putting on paper what had already been agreed informally on voting rights. Anna Fotyga, Polish foreign minister, called it a “gentlemen’s agreement” struck late at night with the German presidency.
His threat to block a new treaty won Poland a reprieve in the introduction of the new system until 2014. It will not come fully into effect until 2017. Now he claims there was a misunderstanding on a specific part of the deal which would allow a country to delay EU decisions if they are just short of enough votes to block them. Warsaw says it had agreed to a delay of two years in such cases, but EU officials say the deal was for decisions to be postponed only until the next EU summit. The summits are held three to four months apart.
That Poland agreed a deal without fully understanding it supports suspicions in the outgoing German EU presidency that Warsaw did not have the technical expertise to grasp the complexity of the negotiations. A purge by Poland’s ruling Kaczynski twins – Mr Kaczynski’s brother Lech is president – has removed many experienced diplomats because of their links with Poland’s communist past.
A quarter of the countryÂ’s emÂbassies are without amÂbassadors; it has no ambassador in Lisbon in spite of the new EU role about to be assumed by Portugal. José Manuel Barroso, Commission president, said adjustments to the treaty agreement could be discussed, but ”nothing that would contradict the agreement that was unanimously obtained.”