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Poles clear path for deal on eu constitution { March 19 2004 }

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Poles clear path for deal on EU constitution
By George Parker in Warsaw
Published: March 19 2004 4:00 | Last Updated: March 19 2004 4:00

Poland yesterday cleared the way for an early deal on a new European Union constitution,further raising hopes that the dispute can finally be settled.

The country's three top politicians said the time had come to reach a compromise on the new treaty and that Warsaw would no longer stand in the way of a deal. The new constitution would give the EU a new president and foreign minister, streamline decision making in a union of 25 members and attempt to make it more democratically accountable.

Leszek Miller, the prime minister, said he did not want his country to be isolated after the new Socialist government in Spain signalled it would no longer fight alongside Poland in a battle over EU voting weights.

"For an individual loneliness is a very unpleasant mental state," he told Brussels-based journalists. "For a country it would be very dangerous."

Mr Miller said he would recommend to Bertie Ahern, the Irish holder of the rotating EU presidency, that talks on the constitution should be relaunched at next week's summit in Brussels.

Poland and Spain opposed a compromise deal over voting power at December's Brussels summit, putting them at odds with France and Germany. Both countries wanted to cling to the preferential voting weights agreed at the Nice summit in 2000. Now Madrid and Warsaw say they are prepared to negotiate a deal based on a simpler "double majority" system.

Josef Oleksy, Poland's deputy prime minister, said: "I think the starting point should be an acceptance of the principle of a double majority."

The move will delight Germany and France, although Mr Ahern still has the task of finding a voting formula that will be acceptable to all member states.

Irish diplomats believe other issues relating to the constitution, including the size of the European Commission and the use of national vetoes, can be resolved. Poland's social democrat government resents the way Spain's new Socialist leadership left it exposed on the voting question. Aleksander Kwasniewski, Poland's president, said there was no Warsaw-Madrid axis and that both countries were defending the Nice voting system for their own separate reasons.

* Mr Kwasniewski said yesterday his country had been "misled" over the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but there was no suggestion that Polish troops would be pulled out of the country until their mission was complete.

He said Poland would not follow the lead of the new Socialist government in Spain, which said it would withdraw its troops by July 1 unless the United Nations was given a greater mandate. However, he admitted that the absence of any evidence of WMD in Iraq had made life more difficult for the government in Warsaw, which is already deeply unpopular.

"Obviously we are feeling uncomfortable with the fact that we were misled by certain information about WMD," he told a press conference in Warsaw.




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