Malta's representatives at last week’s European Council deserve a round of applause for what was achieved, not only for the future functioning of the European Union but also for Malta itself.

Malta’s delegation – led by Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi, Foreign Affairs Minister Michael Frendo and Malta’s Permanent Representative to the EU Richard Cachia Caruana – scored what could be considered the country’s crowning achievement at the summit, that of securing Malta the right to a sixth European Parliamentary seat as from 2009.

The development will certainly enhance Malta’s representation in the EU’s law-making process, while the political stakes of Malta’s MEP elections will take on a new character.

Malta also negotiated, along with Cyprus, an exemption from EU rules on special funding of small islands, which previously excluded island nations that have a capital city.

The first conclusion to emerge from the summit was an endorsement of the European Commission and European Central Bank approval of Malta’s eurozone membership, while Malta also received solid commitments on European solidarity on the migration issue.

The Council meeting, effectively a summit of the EU’s heads of government and foreign ministers, dragged across a gruelling two days of arduous negotiations.

Friday’s session alone saw EU leaders haggling for some 20 hours, only emerging at dawn on Saturday with a hard fought deal, dubbed the Reform Treaty, in hand.

With talks at the outset having hit a seemingly insurmountable hurdle – in the form of Poland’s objections to a new Council voting weighting system proposed by the German EU presidency – it was something of a surprise that EU leaders managed to strike a deal in the end, and that Malta also came out on top for its efforts.

Poland’s objections, which overshadowed the better part of the historic gathering, were to Germany’s proposed double majority voting system. Poland instead insisted on a square root population-based weighting to determine the number of votes each country would be awarded at Council meetings.

With Poland threatening to use its veto, and other member states staunchly opposed to Poland’s insistence that it deserved compensatory votes for the decimation of its population in WWII, hopes of a compromise had appeared dim.

For want of a solution, it had been boldly announced late on night two that the German presidency had decided to go ahead with an inter-

governmental conference to etch the treaty in stone without Poland, suggesting it could join the European consensus at a later date if it so wished.

The virtually unprecedented exclusion of a member state in such a manner, however, appeared to be a strong-arm ploy by the German presidency to force Poland into a compromise.

The strategy worked however, and news of a deal began to trickle in as a final press conference was awaited. By 4.30am European Commission President José Barroso was ready to present German Chancellor Angela Merkel with a bouquet of flowers at the summit’s victorious concluding press conference before a packed auditorium.

It was eventually settled that the double majority system would be implemented come 2014, with a transitional period up to 2017.

While neither system would have affected Malta’s vote ratio, Malta had opposed the Polish proposal since a deal along such lines would have jeopardised other sections of the preliminary text approved in 2004.

After two days of intense haggling at the summit – Tony Blair’s last and Nicholas Sarkozy’s first – European Union leaders eventually emerged from the record length EU summit at sunrise to a new day and to what is hoped will be a new future for the EU.

The Reform Treaty, however, is not the Constitution the EU had been after and much still depends on the results of July’s inter-governmental conference, where the technicalities of the Reform Treaty’s conclusions will be smoothed out.

The conference, to be held by the end of July, will finalise the summit’s conclusions and, provided EU consensus remains in place, the EU27 will be in a position to sign the Reform Treaty at the next summit in December.

More still will depend on ratification of the Reform Treaty by all member states in 2008 and early 2009, including Malta – despite it having already ratified the treaty’s predecessor – and a crucial referendum in Ireland.