Polish president demands EU budget quid pro quo
Bronislaw Komorowski - Photo EC
(BRUSSELS) - New Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski urged EU partners on Wednesday to protect grants for poorer regions and farm payments, citing Warsaw's willingness to help fund eurozone bailouts.
Komorowski used the start of a three-day visit to key European Union allies in Brussels, which will also take him to France and Germany, to demand a quid pro quo when it comes to showing "solidarity" with the 27-nation bloc.
Poland is "ready to be engaged in certain projects that are perhaps not an obligation for us," Komorowski said in reference to financial aid for indebted euro countries separate from an existing international Greek bailout.
"At the same time, we expect that cohesion funds are maintained," he added after talks with European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso, who is also resisting national government calls for four billion euros (five billion dollars) to be slashed from next year's EU budget.
"It's so important to make solidarity real, to make our development levels more equal," he said.
"It's important we keep the current rules," he stressed, referring to so-called cohesion funding, mostly grants for the EU's poorer regions which are often linked to accession conditions for the bloc's enlargement.
"It's also important to use the direct payments to farmers according to the same rules," he said, deeming such payments "necessary" to Poland.
More than half the total cuts sought -- just under two billion euros -- should come from cohesion funding, ambassadors said last month despite seven members, some like Britain which wanted deeper cuts, refusing to endorse even those sums.
They added that the Common Agricultural Policy, historically the biggest single EU oulay, should itself be cut by more than 800 million euros to 57.3 billion euros.
Free-market liberal Komorowski, 58, was sworn in earlier this month after winning snap elections forced by the April plane crash death of predecessor Lech Kaczynski, his wife and 94 Polish officials.
During his campaign, he called for an accelerated switch to the shared currency, after recession forced Poland last year to abandon its existing pledge to meet economic criteria by 2012.
Officials in Warsaw now suggest 2015 is more likely.
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