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Merkel is 'Miss World'
24/06/2007 08:01 - (SA)
Guy Jackson
Brussels - German Chancellor Angela Merkel battled through her toughest challenge on the international stage before getting a little help from her European friends in brokering the outline of a new EU treaty on Saturday.
Merkel haggled through the night to overcome fierce opposition from Poland but as the sun started to come up she was able to announce a happy outcome to the search for a successor to the EU's failed constitution.
It was Merkel's second international success in just over two weeks, after she managed to persuade leaders of the world's most industrialised nations to commit to making "substantial" cuts in greenhouse gases at a Group of Eight summit in Germany this month.
As the EU deal was announced by a visibly tired Merkel, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso produced a bouquet of flowers for his colleague and said she had achieved "a success that most people thought unthinkable just some months ago, some even just some days ago."
The chancellor knew that the EU was looking to Germany, its most populous nation and leading economic power, to succeed where others had failed.
Poland
She had repeatedly stressed that a club that has expanded eastwards since 2004 needed a new decision-making framework - and she was determined to deliver it.
But Poland's populist leaders, the Kaczynski twins, dug in hard, refusing to sign up to German plans to reform the voting system which they said would strengthen the hand of big countries such as Germany.
As the Brussels summit moved into a second day, Merkel repeatedly engaged in face-to-face negotiations with Polish President Lech Kaczynski.
When Merkel put a compromise to Kaczynski and his twin brother Jaroslaw - the Polish prime minister who appeared to be masterminding negotiations from Warsaw - it was rejected.
As the talks began to falter, Merkel called Warsaw's bluff, threatening to press ahead witn negotiations on a treaty in an intergovernmental conference without Poland.
Sarkozy
French President Nicolas Sarkozy stepped in to deal with the Poles when Merkel went off for dinner, according to his spokesperson.
Sarkozy's approach appeared to be one of flattery compared to stronger tactics employed the Germans, judging by Sarkozy's statement that "it was not possible to ignore the biggest country in eastern Europe."
Merkel grew up less than 100km from the Polish border in the then communist East Germany and has tried to play on her eastern roots in her dealings with the Kaczynskis.
Yet resentment between the neighbours over Germans expelled from modern-day Poland after World War II has been fuelled by the new Polish leadership.
And before the summit began, the twins prompted anger by evoking Poland's destruction at the hands of the Nazis in World War II as a reason for it to get its way on voting rights.
Poland won a considerable concession on the voting issue, persuading its 26 counterparts to delay the full introduction of the new system until 2017.
Merkel was feted as "Miss World" by Germany's top-selling newspaper, Bild, during the G8 summit as she presided over the gathering leaders including US President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Now she will go down in history as the leader who put the EU on the road to recovery after 2005's constitutional train crash.
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