Portugal wil progressie bij onderhandelingen Grondwet (en)

As incoming EU presidency in the second half of this year, Portugal has made it clear that if there is no significant agreement on a new treaty in six weeks time, it will put the issue on the political back burner for its six month tenure of the bloc.

Portuguese prime minister Jose Socrates said that Berlin, as current EU presidency, will have to secure a "precise mandate" during the EU leaders summit on 21-22 June, otherwise Lisbon would not continue individual negotiations with member states.

He made the announcement after an informal meeting over the weekend in the Portuguese town of Sintra including German chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso to assess the state of play on the treaty negotiations.

While appearing to up the public pressure for a deal, Mr Socrates' words dovetail with Germany's own policy of trying to get as much agreed at the summit as possible.

Mrs Merkel is pushing to get all the big issues out of the way in order to have an intergovernmental conference on the rest of the issues during Portugal's presidency - beginning 1 July - that is to be as "technical as possible," according to diplomats.

The strategy stems in part from the fear that Portugal, followed by Slovenia, taking over the presidency in January 2008, will not have the political clout to force other - bigger - member states to come to a deal.

EU presidencies give political guidance to the bloc and are tasked with trying to find agreement among the 27 member states on the issues of the day.

For its part, Germany has also attached significant public importance to the constitutional task seeing its presidency as the last chance to set in motion a timetable that would see all member states ratify a new treaty by mid 2009 - the date of the next European elections.

Speaking after the Sintra meeting, the German chancellor called on other EU member states to work together on the issue.

"I am certain that we will accomplish it if we remain united, if we work together," she said, according to AFP. "It is in our interest and it is our responsibility to allow Europe to act in the face of the challenges that confront us."

According to Spanish daily El Pais, quoting a senior official attending the Sintra meeting, "quite some time" in the gathering was spent analysing the proposals of French president-elect Nicolas Sarkozy, the ideas of Gordon Brown, the likely successor to British leader Tony Blair, as well as the difficulties that the Dutch and Polish governments have in relation to a new treaty.

Germany revived negotiations on a new-look treaty for the bloc at the beginning of the year following 18 months of almost complete political silence after France and the Netherlands rejected the EU constitution in mid-2005.

In order to get a deal, Berlin has to keep as much of the original treaty as possible intact to please the 18 countries that have already largely ratified the document, while taking into account the sceptical public in many of the remaining nine countries.

However, this delicate balancing act looks to be upset by two key member states - Poland, which wants to renegotiate the voting system and the UK which wants as small a treaty as possible.