Polish position

For the last two days, I am visiting Warsaw, together with the high level group of MEP's from the Constitutional Affairs Committee of the EP. This visit included meetings with Polish Senate and representatives of Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It is worth saying that we did not meet representatives from Sejm as those were not interested in such an opportunity...

Yesterday the delegation met with representatives of Senate, Undersecretary of MFA and civil society groups in Poland. Meeting with the Senate was quite interesting even though majority of members do agree on the need to continue the Constitutional process, while keeping the current treaty as a basis. The encounter with Undersecretary was terrible experience... relatively young functionaire started by saying how honoured he is to discuss with MEP's whose books he was reading while teaching his students of European integration...then he proudly informed that he is largely informed about work of the EP, since he was a stagiare in the Parliament... He was very vague on definition of Polish positions and neither he was able to argument any of the statements he was making... MEP's were quite nasty and exposed him in many ways, while clearly saying that he is rather unprepared for the job he has...

Meeting today was with Polish Sherpas (secretive group of selected officials that deal with the documents related to the June Council and IGC). This meeting was very interesting. Secretary of State of MFA of Poland clearly presented her position and was open to debate it.

In the nutshell... Poland is in agreement to work on the basis of the current treaty, they would like to expand part 3 of the text while adding climate change and common energy policy, however they are debating the possibility to discuss the majority voting system. They do agree on the need to have a double majority, but when it comes to the demographic criteria they would like it to be counted differently. Polish colleagues are suggesting the square root system of counting the demographic criteria. I still need to find out what it means in practice, but so far I understand that they want to take the number of people living the the country and apply the square root to that. For the Polish side this proposal seems to be more democratic and much more efficient than the current option... One can argue that even if one could think of agreeing with their suggestion is it really worth reopening the entire chapter on institutional construction...

Quote from the meeting:

Let us not create an impression that the most famous personality in relation to the Constitutional Treaty will be Pandora... (reference to Pandora's box that can be opened).

Very interesting and in many ways rich experience to learn and discuss about the Constitution with those that actually not only care about it, but they also wrote it...