EP speaker tells Poland not to block constitution

One of the first senior EU figures to express a public comment on the news was Hans-Gert Pottering, the speaker of the European Parliament (EP). "If Poland wants to change the voting system inside the EU, Poland needs to remember that this will mean a clear breach of the will of the 27 EU governments, who signed the treaty in its current wording," he said in an interview. Meanwhile, some other officials and experts questioned whether Poland's preoccupation with voting weights really made sense. "Poland should have learned by now that what matters is not the number of votes but the capacity to build coalitions," says Danuta Huebner, EU Commissioner for Regional Development who participated in drafting the constitution as a representative of then Polish government. (Rzeczpospolita, p. A9; Gazeta Wyborcza, p. 12) R.M.