By: CHRIS GRAEME
HEADWAY IS being made during Portugal’s Presidency of the European Union to solve the current Poland voting rights dispute.
At a meeting in Lisbon on Thursday with Portuguese Foreign Minister Luís Amado, Polish Foreign Minister Anna Elzbieta Fotyga said the devil was in the detail and that disagreements now rested on purely unspecified “technical points”.
At the end of June, Poland threatened to stall agreement over the new European Union Treaty, the Treaty of Lisbon, which underpins Portugal’s main objective for this, its third Presidency of the European Union between now and December.
On June 29, in Berlin, Poland said it would reopen negotiations on voting rights, a contentious issue that European Union members thought they had resolved during a weekend long summit.
Poland wants more voting rights in Brussels on account of its geographical size and strategic location rather than as a proportionally represented reflection of its actual population which stands at 38.518,241 million.
Its argument is that, during World War II, it lost a fifth of its population, which, had it survived, would entitle it to as many voting rights as Germany and France.
Nationalist right wing catholic lobbies in Poland want an EU voting system that would give small countries (like Poland) the power to veto decisions while reducing the voting power of large countries such as France and Germany.
At the Berlin, summit Poland was awarded considerable concessions in that the new voting system for member states will be delayed until 2017.
But then Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczysnki said he wanted to renegotiate the package brokered at the summit by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
At a news conference in Warsaw, Polish Prime Minister said the voting system was far from settled and added the voting mechanism was unfair because it would not allow member states with insufficient votes to delay an EU decision pertaining to them (i.e. Poland) since “they did not have enough votes to block one.”
Adjustments
Poland is also against closer economic ties between the European Union and Russia and is enraged at Russia’s decision to threaten Poland’s friendly neighbour Byelorussia with cutting gas supplies.
Durão Barroso, the EU Commissioner, said adjustments to the treaty on the issue could be made, but “nothing that would contradict the agreement that was unanimously obtained.”
Portuguese Prime Minister José Sócrates, who was at the summit, said: “The mandate is clear and precise on what has to be done.”
Anna Elzbieta Fotyga said in Lisbon on Thursday that, “progress was made at the recent summit and we would like to maintain the pace of the Treaty negotiation and adoption process and we accept the general content of the IGC (Intergovernmental Conference) mandate and look forward to the Portuguese Presidency’s work towards the adoption of the reformed Treaty.”
Bilateral relationships between the two countries and Poland’s other strategic trading partners and neighbours including Germany, the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Russia and Kosovo were also discussed.
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