A few years ago, Poland was the economic darling of Eastern Europe.

It had dodged the recession and currency problems of other former Communist nations like Hungary and began posting growth percentages that wowed investors. They reacted by pumping billions into the economy. Unemployment levels were steady, direct investment was high and typically pessimistic Poles were awash in optimism as they began negotiating for EU entry in 1998.

How quickly things change.

Growth has slumped, unemployment has soared to 17 percent of the population and the people are starting to express their doubts about EU entry. All this with the deadline for 2004 entry almost upon them.

Poland is the largest and most unwieldy of the 13 countries negotiating for entry into the until-now exclusive Western European club. Polish and EU negotiators have clashed repeatedly on a number of conditions for EU entry – laid out in a 80,000 page document.

The farmer’s plight

The European Union is getting impatient with Poland’s bulldog stance on several key issues, chief among them agriculture and unemployment. Polish EU advocates are as well. But a heavy resistance among Polish farmers and a recent government change have put up major obstacles on the road to progress.

The farmers are worried they will become an extinct species when Poland gets flooded by agricultural products from highly industrialized EU farms. The EU, fed up with the 20 percent share agriculture has in the Polish labor market, has done nothing to assuage their fears.

Product quotas assigned to all EU members promise to be far lower than those of the western states, meaning Polish farmers will have a limit to how much they can sell. They can’t depend on the rich subsidies enjoyed by current members either. The EU has said that candidate countries will receive only 25 percent of the subsidies out of the € 40 billion ($ 36 billion) Union agriculture budget that current countries enjoy.

What’s more, "Polish farmers are not ready to apply and fulfill all the bureaucratic requirements needed to get the subsidies," Chris Wietrzny, a farm lobbyist, told DW-WORLD. "There are only a small amount of farms who can benefit from the subsidies, around 25 percent. For the rest of the farmers, a difficult period will start, because they will not be able to compete on the external market."

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No jobs at home, not allowed to work elsewhere

Low quotas and overwhelming competition will only add to another current problem and entry obstacle: high unemployment. Levels have climbed from around 13 percent in 1998 to 17 percent of the population in 2001, according to government statistics. Young people, in particular, are difficult to motivate into employment with many still living off of generous Communist-era welfare checks.

State costs will only increase if the country’s two million family farms go under because of an inability to transform themselves into the mechanized, mono-crop farms favored by EU member states. The fact could widen an already significant divide between Poland's well-off city-dwellers and their poverty-stricken countrymen out on the land.

Second-class citizens

Polish laborers were dealt another blow when Brussels – in a nod to Austria and Germany – ruled recently they would have to wait seven years before being allowed to work in EU countries. That, of course, hasn’t stopped Polish workers from working illegally in places like Germany and Austria, who desperately need them for low-level jobs in construction, farm and factory work.

But the ban adds to the opinion among many in the population that Poland, if it makes it, comes into the Union as a second-class citizen. The sentiment is a major reason support for EU membership has been waning since Poland first applied in 1994.

Government change = new hope?

Still government officials are optimistic – if for no other reason than that there is no other choice.

Observers note that if new Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller (photo) doesn’t get Poland into the Union a re-election is pretty much out of the question.

Miller, a member of the successor to the former Communist party, already faces domestic pressure to lead the country out of the economic swamp Poland’s previous conservative government mired it in.

There is hope. Miller unlike his predecessor Jerzy Buzek, has a strong coalition and enjoys a majority in the government. This has already attracted the attention of investors, who after pumping a record € 14.5 billion ($13 billion) into the government in 2000, have shied away in the past two years.

Prime Minister Miller’s appointment of Marek Belka, an American-trained economist, as his finance minister has also helped matters.

The clock is ticking with more urgency. The EU wants to wrap up negotiations with candidate countries by the end of this year. At least 10 of the 29 legislative chapters needed to be completed for Poland’s EU entry remain open.

The admission of Poland into the Union, so often history’s victim, is something both sides want. But Poland will have to move quickly if it wants to join the club.