Merkel: Summit supremo?

At this week's European Union summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel will call upon all her powers of negotiation to convince Poland's conservative leaders to accept the proposed revisions of the bloc's draft Constitutional Treaty.

 Berlin, which currently holds the EU's rotating presidency, wants to unveil a plan on the outline of a new treaty and how to ratify it before European Parliament elections in 2009. However, Warsaw has threatened to impose its veto at the summit. It wants further negotiations on the EU's qualified majority voting system as set out in the Nice Treaty, whereby the number of votes allocated to each country in the Council of the European Union is roughly determined by its population. Germany has ruled out reopening that debate.

Square root or death?

Merkel has good reasons for pushing through treaty reform. Under the current Nice Treaty voting procedures, Poland has almost the same number of votes as Germany, with less than half the population.

The EU Qualified Majority Voting system

	Votes	Population (millions)
Source: BBC
Germany	29	82.1
France	29	61.4
UK	29	60.5
Italy	29	58
Spain	27	44.7
Poland	27	38.1
Romania	14	21.7
Netherlands	13	16.5
Greece	12	11.1
Portugal	12	10.6

The draft constitution proposes a double majority voting system, which takes greater account of a country's population. This would boost Germany's voting weight and reduce Poland's.

Warsaw favours a complicated system whereby each country's votes derive from the square root of its population. That would sharply reduce Germany's power relative to Poland. Worryingly for Merkel, the Poles have adopted "square root or death" as their slogan for the summit.

The summit is expected to hand the task of preparing a new constitutional treaty to an inter-governmental conference (IGC) by year-end. But Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has decided that unless negotiations are extended, there is no point in starting the IGC. The Kaczynski twins (president and prime minister) and their conservative Law and Justice party will try to embarrass Merkel by resorting to nationalist, anti-EU rhetoric, emphasising their defence of national sovereignty and culture. 

A failure would suit the UK, which fears having to put the constitution in front of their voters in a referendum. The Czech Republic is also part of the awkward squad:  President Vaclav Klaus has said he believed that Germany was trying to introduce the rejected EU constitution by stealth. He claimed last week that only cosmetic changes had been made to the treaty and the basic document remained the same.

'Don't hold your breath'

Merkel has a habit of watering down expectations before a major strategic challenge. Pre-G8, she told the world not to expect miracles, then conjured up a deal on climate change – albeit a broad and somewhat insubstantial compromise.

Merkel has tried the same trick again; she has conceded that some countries' starting positions are very different and everybody's ability to compromise will be tested. Unfortunately for her, expectations are higher this time round, with most of the continent keen to move the EU out of the deadlock it has been in since the French and Dutch "no" to the draft constitution in 2005. A "roadmap" to a new treaty looks feasible, but consensus on a new EU constitutional treaty will be nigh impossible.