MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

EU leaders can't agree on the Constitution

European leaders are returning home from the Brussels summit without having reached an agreement on the final draft of an EU Constitution and with little prospects for follow discussions in the near future.

Efforts to reach a compromise on how voting will work when the EU expands from 15 to 25 members in May broke down after Poland and Spain insisted on keeping voting rights already secured, while France and Germany want a system to reflect their bigger populations.

In spite of the current EU rotating presidency initial optimism, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, there are fears the failure may deepen splits over the speed of integration. The continuing disagreements about the constitution could lead to a two-speed Europe, with a core group - including France and Germany - pushing ahead with integration

However European leaders tried to downplay differences emphasizing on what was achieved in the majority of issues of the constitutional agenda including an agreement on closer integration of defence.

"There is no drama or crisis with a capital C," said French President Jacques Chirac. British Prime Minister Tony Blair argued it had been better to abandon the talks, rather than holding deliberations throughout the night and coming up with a poor agreement. "It is better to give it some time, for countries to have some time to find an accord," he told reporters

"The question is: is the bottle half full or half empty?" indicated Mr Berlusconi. "I'm a half full kind of guy." But Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson said talks on the constitution were unlikely to resume until 2005. The problem now falls to Ireland, which takes over the EU presidency in January. Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said he would give a progress report at the next summit in March.

The major controversy is the "total disagreement" over voting rights in the European Council, that is, the power to influence major EU policy decisions, basically if it should be weighted according to member nations' populations. As medium-sized countries, Spain and Poland have said they cannot accept a deal that would give too much clout to the bloc's big players, especially Germany and France, which have more than twice their population.

Warsaw and Madrid had been demanding that the EU abide by the 1999 Nice Treaty that gives nations votes based only loosely on population. Under that system, Germany has 29 votes, while Poland and Spain almost as many, 27, despite having half the population. Italian diplomats said that four separate ways round the deadlock had been discussed and considered, but none of them prospered. The first would have been a face-saving declaration putting off a decision until a later date but this, they said, was rejected out of hand by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

The second would have amended the proposal requiring just 50% of the soon-to-be 25 EU member nations with 60% of the population to approve policy, by keeping the national threshold at 50% but taking the population requirement to 63%.

The third would have had the original "double majority" system applied gradually from 2009 and not fully implemented until 2014.

The final one was an agreement to postpone a decision on power sharing arrangements until 2008 with the condition that at that time, the vote should be decided by a numerical majority with all nations renouncing the use of their veto power.