Poland Softens Tone on EU Treaty

Poland softened its tone on a treaty to reform European Union institutions on Monday before the start of formal negotiations to turn a political deal clinched at a summit last month into a legal text.

Polish Foreign Minister Anna Fotyga said she wanted to clarify a compromise reached on the voting system for decision-making in the 27-nation bloc, but she stopped short of saying Warsaw would insist on reopening the issue.

"We are optimistic. Poland does not have a problem with the treaty. We just want to clarify certain things, as other countries do," Fotyga told reporters on arrival for a meeting of EU foreign ministers to launch the negotiations.

EU president Portugal is determined to rush through the legal work of turning the political deal into a treaty, distributing a first draft on Monday and aiming to conclude an agreement at an Oct. 18-19 summit.

Many EU leaders have warned Poland against reopening the deal it won last month, which delayed the full entry into force of a new population-based voting system until 2017 and set a lower threshold for countries to delay decisions after that.

The ink on the summit deal was barely dry when Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski said Warsaw had won the right for groups of states short of a blocking minority to postpone decisions for up to two years. EU officials said the maximum delay would be four months, until the next European summit.

"Our experts have been analysing the issue ... for example the issue of repeating certain processes so that the mechanism is used in order to achieve a consensus," Fotyga said without elaborating.


RISKING EU IRE

The treaty, replacing the constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005, provides for a long-term EU president and foreign policy chief, a simpler, more democratic voting system and more say for the European and national parliaments.

Legal experts will spend two days this week examining the text to identify potential difficulties.

The opening session of the Intergovernmental Conference was set to be largely ceremonial and the presidency aims to keep the talks strictly technical until early September, when foreign ministers will have a chance to raise any political problems.

That will be the real test of whether Poland is prepared to risk the ire of all its EU partners by trying to reopen the voting system reform, diplomats said.

The new system is based largely on population size and will give big countries such as Germany more weight at the expense of medium-sized and smaller states, especially Poland.

Diplomats played down the risk of other issues, such as the future of Turkey's membership talks, holding up the treaty.

They said Britain, one of Ankara's strongest supporters, wanted the treaty concluded as soon as possible to face down demands by Eurosceptics for a referendum and lay the issue to rest before a possible early general election.

Only Sweden may demand assurances that France will not press President Nicolas Sarkozy's call to change the objective of Turkey's negotiations in December before signing up to the reform treaty in October, they said.