Poland rejected a compromise offer over a new treaty to reform the European Union, delivering a blow to other EU leaders' hopes of reaching an agreement today.
"We have hit a wall," Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski said on Polish television, adding he feared there may be no solution to the stand-off at an EU summit in Brussels.
Poland's President Lech Kaczynski arrives at the European Council building on the second day of a EU heads of state summit in Brussels. Reuters/Sebastien Pirlet
"The lack of any willingness to back down is very clear on the side of our partners and I am afraid there may be no way out...I am very sorry about that," Kaczynski said.
He made the announcement as his twin brother, President Lech Kaczyinski, met German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the tense summit to give her Poland's official response to the offer.
Other leaders said the Polish rejection of the compromise offer, drawn up by Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, could prove to be just another round in the high-stakes wrangling with Warsaw.
"Sometimes (the Poles) are a little bit more pro, sometimes they are a little bit against. We have different stages during the day, but there will be a result, I am convinced," said Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer.
The leaders had earlier today scored a first success in their two-day summit by reaching a broad agreement on creating a new, single post to run the 27-nation bloc's foreign affairs.
But the meeting risked failure over the attempt to overhaul the EU's rickety institutions with a new treaty, two years after a more ambitious constitution was rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands.
Poland was holding out against a planned re-weighting of voting rights which it says would favour Germany at its expense, and Britain also stood its ground on other issues.
Merkel, hosting the summit at the end of Germany's six-month presidency of the Union, says the treaty will help the EU face challenges such as global warming.
Critics fear a dilution of national sovereignty.
Merkel met Polish President Lech Kaczynski at least four times on Friday to try to break the impasse and the negotiations were expected to stretch into Friday night.
EU leaders were shocked by Poland's repeated references to its suffering at the hands of Nazi Germany during World War Two to justify its opposition to the voting system. It says it would have a larger population were it not for heavy wartime losses.