VIANA DE CASTELO, Portugal - EU foreign ministers voiced optimism on Friday a deal could be clinched on a major reform treaty next month, despite a looming Polish election and pressure in Britain for a referendum.
European Union leaders agreed in June on a blueprint for the treaty to overhaul the enlarged 27-nation bloc's creaking institutions, replacing a more ambitious EU constitution that was rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005.
Legal experts have been working quietly to turn that mandate into a treaty against a backdrop of political crisis in Poland, which resisted the deal, and a campaign by Eurosceptics to force British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to put the text to voters.
EU president Portugal was confident the bloc's leaders would agree on the treaty at a summit on Oct. 18-19, despite new demands by Poland, whose conservative Eurosceptic cabinet has long sought to boost its clout in EU decision-making.
"We have a timetable and we are sticking to that ambition. We all agreed we should conclude at the upcoming summit in October," Portuguese Foreign Minister Luis Amada told a news conference after the first day of the ministers' talks.
"Everything we heard today comforts us in that expectation."
The treaty would give the EU a long-term president and a stronger foreign policy chief, a streamlined, more democratic voting system based largely on population size and more say for national and European parliaments.
Polish Foreign Minister Anna Fotyga confirmed her country wanted, like Britain, to be partly exempted from an EU charter on fundamental rights which guarantees certain minimum rights for workers. The treaty would give the charter legal force.
