POLAND:POLISH PRIME minister Donald Tusk has said he will call a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty if opposition leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski continues to block parliamentary ratification.
The Lisbon Treaty ratification Bill was intended to pass through the Polish parliament with broad cross-party support, guaranteeing the required two-thirds majority.
Now leading Polish diplomats say an "inter-party war" means that Poles could decide on the Lisbon Treaty at the ballot box.
A Polish referendum on top of an Irish poll could revive calls for treaty votes elsewhere in the EU.
"If in their belligerence [ Law and Justice] block the Lisbon Treaty, we will have to appeal to the people in a referendum," said Mr Tusk yesterday. "I hope this can be avoided."
On the surface, it is a contradictory row: Mr Kaczynski is attacking the treaty compromise agreed by his government and hailed by him last June as a "success for Poland".
Below the surface, however, is another round in the domestic political battle between Donald Tusk and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, five months after Mr Tusk won the general election.
Mr Kaczynski, under pressure from ultra-conservative nationalist MPs within his own Law and Justice party (PiS), has revived old concerns that Mr Tusk's government will sign Poland up to the Charter of Fundamental Rights accompanying the treaty.
That could force Poland to legislate for gay marriage, Mr Kaczynski said, and allow Germans regain land lost in today's western Poland - arguments long since rejected by Polish and EU experts.
His twin brother, President Lech Kaczynski, went on television on Monday night to say that only a new preamble to the ratification Bill would guarantee Polish interests.
"It's a completely cynical move by Law and Justice to call for a preamble that would have no legal standing," said Piotr Kaczynski of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels. "There is no rationality here: Law and Justice negotiated the treaty, they praised it, they liked it, therefore they should be in favour of it."
Mr Kaczynski has already lost nine MPs since the general election and now risks alienating a sizeable pro-treaty wing of the party.
For Mr Tusk, the risk of going to the people is that, despite popular support for the EU in Poland, a referendum vote in favour would have to top 50 per cent to be valid.
Even if a referendum is avoided and parliament ratifies the Bill, Polish legal opinion is divided over what happens next. Government experts say Mr Kaczynski is obliged to sign the ratification Bill into law; the president's advisers suggest he can still veto it.
"The point in time for a political compromise has passed," said Pawel Swieboda, director of the Demoseuropa think tank. "Now we are going to see a furious fight to the end."