Poland to propose ‘square root’ voting system for the Council

The Polish government is insisting on changing the system proposed by the EU constitution for calculating each country’s allocation of votes in the Council of Ministers, basing the number of votes on the square root of population size.

Speaking at a panel at the College of Europe in Natolin, near Warsaw, on 22 March, Marek Cichocki, EU affairs adviser to President Lech Kaczynski, said: "We are prepared to discuss the constitutional treaty as a starting point but it should be modified significantly."

Ewa Osniecka-Tamecka, Poland’s other negotiator on the EU constitution, said it was a "stereotype" that Poland was fighting against the double majority voting system agreed as part of the constitution. "Poland believes this system is adequate because the Union is a Union of state and citizens," she said. The problem was to create a system of voting in which the influence of every citizen in the Union was the same, she said. "The solutions in the constitutional treaty are far from that," she added. Osniecka-Tamecka said that Poland was instead proposing a system where the number of votes of each member state was "proportional to the square root of the population and the number of votes needed to make a decision".

While the German presidency was arguing for a limited mandate for an intergovernmental conference to agree new treaty changes, she said that for Poland the voting system was part of the political substance of the constitution. She conceded that ensuring that the voting system was included in the mandate would be a "difficult task" because no-one else was proposing including it. But she rejected the argument that including the double majority system in the mandate would lead to "opening Pandora’s box" ie, raising too many sensitive issues which could not be resolved quickly.

As part of the constitution, EU governments agreed on a new double majority voting system where decisions in the Council have to be approved by 55% of member states representing at least 65% of the EU’s total population. A qualified majority should also include at least 15 member states while a blocking minority has to include at least four states.

The double majority system was designed to take account of Germany’s population size, which rose to 80 million after reunification, and represented an historic departure from traditional voting parity in the Council of Ministers with France. French President Jacques Chirac insisted on maintaining this parity in the Nice treaty negotiations but the system agreed as part of Nice was almost universally condemned as unnecessarily complex and opaque. It effectively involved a treble majority as decisions required a majority of votes (73.4% in an EU of 27) and a majority of member states but also the possibility for a member state to ask for a check that the majority represents 62% of the total population of the EU.

During the negotiations on the constitution, in 2002-03, members of the Polish opposition Civic Platform (PO) party campaigned on the slogan "Nice or death", a reference to keeping the voting strength given to Poland by the Nice treaty.

The system being promoted by the Polish government is based on a formula developed by the British mathematician Lionel Sharples Penrose in 1946 for application to voting in the United Nations. It calculates the number of votes per member states by taking the square root of the population, expressed in thousands, dividing it by ten and then rounding up to the neatest whole number (see table). A study into the system carried out by students at the College of Europe’s Natolin campus points out that the Nice formula was manifestly unfair to Germany as Poland and Spain together have nearly twice as many votes as Germany (54 to 29) although their combined population is 79 million, less than Germany’s 82 million. The study argues that the square root system is fairer to Germany, reflecting Germany’s position as the most populous member states but without "producing a massive shift of power away from the middle sized countries".

The solution proposed by the Convention which produced the first draft of the constitution would have shifted power to the four largest countries and the six smallest from the 17 mid-sized countries. The square root system, on the other hand, would benefit Germany with only minimal losses for France, Italy and the UK, more significant losses for Spain and Poland and moderate gains for Malta, Cyprus, Estonia, Slovenia, Latvia, Finland, Slovakia, Denmark, the Netherlands and Romania.

At the same time, the square root system would make it easier to take decisions in the Council. Using Penrose’s matemathical formula to establish the statistical likelihood of forming coalitions in favour of decisions, the square root model has a probability of 19.1%, slightly less than the 21.9% under the constitution voting system but nine times higher than the Nice model’s 2.1%. Even if Turkey were to join the Union, the decision-making probability is still 19.5% which, the study claims, shows that "the square root method creates conditions where enlargement does not generate a huge drop in system output".

German centre-right MEP Elmar Brok said last week that he doubted there would be much support for moving to a system which "could only be understood by reference to mathematical formulae". Brok, who was the European Parliament’s representative for the Amsterdam and Nice treaty negotiations, said that the double majority system agreed as part of the constitution was "fairer" and protected smaller countries because larger countries needed smaller ones to take decisions. He said that a large majority of member states thought that the constitution system was a "fair compromise".

The Polish government is insisting on changing the system proposed by the EU constitution for calculating each country’s allocation of votes in the Council of Ministers, basing the number of votes on the square root of population size.