Hopes rise for EU expansion deal

Copenhagen should finalise this round of expansion

By Oana Lungescu BBC correspondent in Brussels

Senior European Union officials have expressed confidence that a deal can be reached on the cost of eastward enlargement at the EU summit in Copenhagen later this week.

Most of the 10 applicant countries have broadly accepted financial terms for EU membership, but Poland continues to request more money.

Forty-eight hours before the start of the Copenhagen summit, the gap is narrowing between what applicant countries want and what the EU is offering.

Most of the 10 applicants have now wrapped up entry talks on condition that if the biggest of them, Poland, gets more in Copenhagen, those concessions will be extended to them too.

Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller, whose country holds the EU presidency, said he was confident that enlargement talks would be completed on Friday.

But, he warned, we are coming to the limit of our generosity.

EU foreign ministers have endorsed a final package of concessions, ranging from higher farm quotas for the Czech Republic to the right to continue hunting lynx in Estonia and Latvia.

But it will be up to EU leaders to agree on the overall cost of expansion, estimated at just over 40 billion euros.

Belt-tightening

According to EU officials, up to two more could be offered as a last-minute sweetener to the former Communist countries.

But negotiations will be tough, not least because Germany, the biggest contributor to the EU budget, is facing serious economic problems.

Turkey is also expected to be given a conditional date to start membership talks, probably in 2005, after a majority of EU foreign ministers supported a Franco-German proposal to that effect.