PARIS (Reuters) - The Greek debt crisis has dealt a setback to prospects of enlarging the euro zone by highlighting the difficulties of managing the single currency area.

Policymakers will not say so officially but only tiny Estonia is likely to join the euro in the next five years, although “euro convergence” will remain the central policy anchor for all the European Union’s eastern newcomers.

“The Germans and the European Central Bank are determined not to let in another Greece,” said Lars Christensen, chief analyst at Danske Bank in Copenhagen.

“Clever Polish policymakers have understood the message and changed their rhetoric to saying they expect to join the euro in 2015 at the earliest,” he said.

Analysts expect the European Commission and the ECB to be stricter than ever in applying the criteria for membership and insisting that candidates must first achieve real, sustainable economic convergence with the euro area. That means taking more account of previously neglected indicators such as current account balances and wider measures of competitiveness.

When eight central and east European countries joined the bloc in May 2004, along with Cyprus and Malta, a Reuters poll of 33 bank economists forecast that they would all join the single currency by this year.

Their accession treaties committed them to adopting the euro once they meet the criteria on public debt and budget deficits, inflation, interest rates and exchange rate stability.

Yet only Cyprus, Malta, Slovenia and Slovakia have entered the now 16-nation single currency area. Lithuania saw its application rejected in 2007 after it narrowly missed the inflation target.

Estonia has a strong chance of acceding next year, EU officials say, but the main central European economies are not likely to join before mid-decade, and possibly much later.

Iceland came knocking at the door of the euro zone in search of a life-raft after its banks collapsed in October 2008 but was told it must first apply for EU membership. Entry talks have yet to begin and could be complicated by a standoff with Britain and the Netherlands over the Icesave compensation issue.

RECEDING HORIZON

The Polish and Czech governments illustrated the receding euro horizon this week when they approved convergence plans that appear to delay membership until the second half of the decade.

Poland, which suffered embarrassment last year when it had to ditch an over-optimistic 2012 entry target, set no new date, while the Czech Republic is now aiming for 2016-17.

Both have floating currencies that depreciated during the financial crisis, helping them avoid the deep recession that struck countries with exchange rates pegged to the euro such as Latvia. Poland was the only EU economy to enjoy growth in 2009.

Public opinion in the former communist countries has become more hesitant about early euro adoption after an initial clamor for quick membership when the global financial crisis struck, a comprehensive Eurobarometer survey published last month showed.

More than two-thirds of voters questioned in eight central and east European states last September said their country should not rush into euro membership.

The number who wanted to join the euro as soon as possible shrank to 25 percent from 28 percent in May 2009. Those who favored entering as late as possible rose to 33 percent from 29 percent.

The specter of Greek-style deflation, with wage and pension sacrifices and high unemployment, is unlikely to make the euro zone look more attractive across the region.

The issue is politically polarized in Poland and the Czech Republic, with big Eurosceptical conservative parties opposed to early entry.

By contrast, Hungary has a broad political consensus in favor of the euro, but it is struggling to clean up its public finances under an IMF-supervised rescue and its chances of joining the single currency zone lie in the middle distance.

Rafal Benecki, senior economist at ING Bank in Warsaw, said Polish policymakers were as keen as ever to join the euro and the failure to set a new deadline was due to uncertainty about when Poland would meet the criteria, not to the Greek crisis.

David Lubin, head of emerging markets at Citigroup in London, said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk was keen to press ahead toward the euro to maximize Warsaw’s political position as “a country to be taken seriously in the post-crisis world.”

Poland would also want to lock in the more favorable current exchange rate around 4 zloty to the euro, rather than the high 3.2 zloty pre-crisis level, he said.

BALKAN BROTHERS?

The Greek crisis has amplified grumbling among EU and German officials that Romania and Bulgaria, which have the worst record in the EU for corruption and organized crime, were admitted to the bloc too soon.

In the eyes of some in Brussels and Frankfurt, they share many of the same problems of dodgy statistics, widespread corruption and tax evasion and a bloated public sector payroll.

“Even before the current crisis, I often heard references to Greece when talking to European officials about central and eastern Europe, particularly in connection with Romania and Bulgaria,” Danske’s Christiansen said.

EU officials say the Commission and the ECB had to talk Bulgaria out of applying to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM2) -- the antechamber to euro membership -- after it joined the EU in 2007, even though it might have technically qualified.

The EU’s poorest member state was told to take its time and focus on “real convergence.”

At the other end of Europe, the Greek crisis has made joining the euro an even harder sell to fiscally conservative Danes and Swedes.

Both countries opted out of the euro in the 1990s and voted against joining the single currency in referendums early in this decade.

“A referendum campaign today would be much harder to win,” said Christensen. “Euro opponents would say: Who wants to join a club with Greece?”