GERMANY:Polish president Lech Kaczynski will lift his threat to veto talks to create a new European treaty if Berlin agrees to put the EU's new voting system back on the discussion table.
The Polish leader is expected to make the suggestion during talks with German chancellor Angela Merkel today near Berlin, a week before the crunch EU summit to settle the future of the treaty, now stripped of its constitutional name and trappings.
At the summit, leaders will be asked to agree to open an inter-governmental conference to agree compromises on about six outstanding issues and ratify the treaty by the end of the year.
Polish officials are unhappy with the treaty's double majority voting system, which is directly related to population size and markedly reduces Warsaw's voting power. Poland favours a proposal whereby voting weights are based on the square root of population: that would give Poland a voting weight two-thirds of Germany's, even though it has half the population.
But leading Polish officials have admitted that they would be happy with almost anything other than the existing voting proposal.
"We don't care about the square root, we just don't want the double majority voting system as it is," said one.
The Polish side is confident Dr Merkel will accept the deal as a face-saving compromise: she earns kudos for restarting the EU down the road to its next treaty, while it can say the battle on voting rights has not yet been lost.
Prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has led an emotional political argument on future EU voting rights in Warsaw, portraying it as a matter of honour or defeat for Poland. But Polish analysts disregard his declamations that Warsaw would rather "die" than accept anything but its preferred voting model.
"Jaroslaw promises all kinds of things and changes his mind, so that doesn't mean much," said Piotr Kaczynski, analyst at the Institute for Public Affairs and no relation to the ruling twins.
"Listening to the unemotional people in power here, you can see that things are not that bad, that they want a deal."
He added: "The Poles are learning that nothing gets attention in Brussels quite like the veto."