EU celebrates treaty deal

BRUSSELS, Saturday (AFP) - European Union leaders today agreed a blueprint for a reform treaty after striking a compromise with Poland in tense all-night talks at a crucial summit. At a pre-dawn news conference, German Chancellor Angela Merkel hailed a “good compromise” over the voting system in the proposed treaty, the issue which had prompted Poland to threaten to block a deal.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair also left his final EU summit having secured valuable concessions on the treaty that he hopes will get it accepted by British lawmakers. Merkel said the agreement would give the bloc which has enlarged from 15 member states to 27 since 2004 the ability to act effectively.

“We have a detailed and clear mandate for an inter-governmental conference” which will draft the full treaty, she said. The conference will thrash out the full reforms which Merkel hopes will be tied up by the end of the year. The aim is to have the treaty ratified by all states ahead of the next European parliamentary elections in 2009.

The new treaty will replace the Union's failed constitution, which was torpedoed by voters in France and the Netherlands in 2005.“I was sure that if we had not achieved this today we would have ended up in a rather disastrous situation as many would have thought they had been pushed too far,” said Merkel, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency till the end of the month.

“We have managed to organise things so that no one can go home and feel they have been put in the corner,” she said. Polish President Lech Kaczynski thanked France and Britain for their “solidarity” in helping to broker a deal.

British Prime Minister Blair, who leaves office next week, and newly elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy both sought to persuade the Polish president and his twin brother, Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, to drop their opposition.

The Kaczynskis had shocked European diplomats ahead of the summit by evoking their country's mass destruction at the hands of the Nazis in World War II as an argument for it to get its way on the voting issue. Spelling out the compromise, Merkel said the double majority voting system -- which Poland strongly opposed because it fears it will give big countries too much decision-making power -- would not be introduced until 2014 and would then be phased in over the next three years.
EU Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said the deal was vital.

“If we could not get it today that would be a real problem for Europe,” he told the post-deal press conference. “I think now we have made a great step forward.” Barroso, producing a bunch of flowers, said Merkel had achieved “a success that most people thought unthinkable just some months ago, some even just some days ago.”