Polish summit row heats up afresh

Bickering over who should represent Poland at the intergovernmental level threatens to spill over into a second EU summit, after the political party of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said he will stay home on 7 November if the president goes to Brussels.

"If the president insists, the premier won't go. Let the president put forward Poland's position on the [financial] crisis alone," a senior member of Mr Tusk's liberal Civic Platform party told Polish newspaper Dziennik on Sunday.

"The president has already confirmed his plans. He's spoken with the French [EU presidency]. From what we hear, there are no problems to have two chairs," said Adam Bielan, a spokesman for President Lech Kaczynski's conservative Law and Justice faction.

The two leaders both turned up for the last EU summit on 15 October, with an angry Mr Tusk forced at times to send away his foreign minister and finance minister from the top table to let the president take one of Poland's official seats.

Following the fiasco, which also saw the president charter a special plane to fly to the EU capital, the prime minister has asked the Polish constitutional court to rule on who should lead the Polish delegation in future.

But it is uncertain whether the court will give its opinion before the extraordinary 7 November meeting, called by French President Nicolas Sarkozy last week to discuss the global financial emergency.

Poland has so far escaped any major bank collapse. But the fears of a Europe-wide recession leading to a drop in Polish exports, as well as a currency crisis in Hungary, have seen a run on the Polish zloty, which has lost 10 percent of its value against the euro in the past few days.

The president's team is widely seen as lacking financial expertise, with Polish analysts saying the EU summit-attendance row is a form of early campaigning for next year's Polish presidential elections.