Polish president gets prickly mandate for EU summit
PHILIPPA RUNNER
05.11.2008 @ 09:27 CET
The Polish government will let Polish President Lech Kaczynski go alone to Friday's (7 November) EU summit, to avoid another fiasco over chairs at the top table. But it will give him a hard to digest pro-euro and pro-Lisbon treaty mandate.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced on Tuesday his decision to stay home, saying he did not want a repeat of the October summit, when a rogue Mr Kaczynski chartered his own plane and gatecrashed the EU meeting, causing protocol havoc and making Poland a figure of fun in European media.
Mr Kaczynski (r) will go to Brussels with an awkward task (Photo: The Council of the European Union)
The government's negotiating mandate - which Mr Kaczynski is obliged to follow under the Polish constitution - will force the president to put forward Poland's plan to join the euro in 2012 and call on all EU states to ratify the Lisbon treaty, placing him in an awkward position.
The eurosceptic Mr Kaczynski last week said quick euro entry will cause inflation and has himself refused to sign off on Lisbon in support of the Irish No vote in June.
Mr Tusk said the mandate was not drafted out of "spite," but because Polish euro entry and broader EU integration will help keep Poland safe amid the financial crisis.
"I can imagine a situation [in which the president ignores the mandate], but I wouldn't accept it," he warned, PAP reports. "We can't apply any extraordinary disciplinary measures, because we don't have them. We can just count on [his] elementary sense of responsibility."
Mr Kaczynski's aides called the proposals "absurd," saying they do not fit in with Friday's summit agenda.
"What does the Lisbon treaty have to do with the financial crisis? It's a paradox. Every reasonable person knows this. I'm curious, who'll even want to talk about the treaty, when Europe is facing such serious tasks, in the context of the crisis," presidential minister Michal Kaminski said on Polish TV, calling Mr Tusk's position "point scoring" and "a strange game."
Presidential advisor Piotr Kownacki told Rzeczpospolita that if French President Nicolas Sarkozy asks Mr Kaczynski why he won't sign Lisbon, the Polish head can answer "it's not us blocking the treaty, it's Ireland."
The Polish president is also embroiled in another scrap over government policy, after on Monday signing a declaration together with Lithuanian President Valdus Adamkus calling on the EU not to restart negotiations on a new EU-Russia agreement.
Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski said he learned of the move from his Lithuanian colleague at a meeting in the French city of Marseille. But the president's men say they consulted with the Polish embassy in Lithuania first.
"The head of the Lithuanian foreign office put the declaration on the table," Mr Sikorski said. "It's not good for our negotiating position [in the EU] that the existence of this document and its contents were a surprise for me."
