As the Yes camp in Ireland claimed on October 2 – without official counting having begun – that it had won the country’s Lisbon Treaty referendum, the next big questions were what would happen in Poland and the Czech Republic, the last two EU states not to have ratified the treaty.
 
If Ireland said "yes" to the Lisbon Treaty in its referendum, Polish president Lech Kaczynski would sign the treaty on behalf of Poland in the middle of the week beginning October 5, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna daily said on October 2, quoting presidential minister Pawel Wypych, Xinhua News Agency said, as quoted by Bulgarian news agency Focus.
 
According to Wypych, Kaczynski repeated many a time that Poland would not hamper the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty.
 
"We are satisfied with the reached compromise. By delaying the signing of the treaty, the president wanted to emphasise that there were no more and less important countries in Europe," Wypych said.
 
"All EU states are equal and that was why the president opposed pressure exerted on a small but heroic nation of history similar to the Polish one," Wypych said.
 
Brussels will welcome with relief the Polish president’s decision, according to the daily.
 
The Lisbon Treaty, signed by EU heads of state and government in December 2007 in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon, was designed to boost the EU's global standing through reforming its institutions.
 
But ratification was stalled as Irish voters rejected the pact in June 2008. The treaty will take effect only after all 27 EU members ratify it.
 
However, the situation in the Czech Republic is more complex. Czech president, Vaclav Klaus – an avowed Eurosceptic – has held out against signing the treaty, which was approved by the Czech parliament several months ago.
 
Further, Czech senators opposed to the Lisbon Treaty, and reportedly allied to Klaus, recently filed a legal complaint to block its adoption, potentially for months.
 
Klaus has said that he would not sign the treaty until the Czech constitutional court has ruled on the challenge by the senators.
 
If, as happened in Germany, the constitutional court requires that the Czech republic amend its legislation to ensure harmonisation with the treaty, the process of ratification in Prague could be delayed even further.
 
This, in turn, raises the next scenario – that if the delay in the Czech Republic continues until the UK parliamentary election in 2010, which is widely expected to bring David Cameron’s Conservatives to power and possibly meaning that British voters would be called to a referendum on Lisbon, even though the treaty already has been approved by London.