Polish ruling coalition on brink of collapse
Monday, 6 August 2007
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Poland's fragile coalition government teetered on the brink yesterday after one of its minority members, the rural and populist Samoobrona ("Self-Defence") party threatened to pull its two remaining ministers out of the government headed by Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
Squabbles within the coalition have racked the government for weeks, and Mr Kaczynski, whose twin brother Lech is President, has repeatedly tried to intimidate his allies into cooperating by threatening a snap election. If the coalition survives, the next general election is due in 2009.
But the situation has been aggravated since the Prime Minister fired the leader of the Self-Defence party, Andrzej Lepper, who served both as agriculture minister and deputy prime minister, after allegations of corruption surfaced.
Mr Lepper is described by one Polish source as "a peasant warlord of dubious reputation," but the allegations against him remain hazy and the Prime Minister seems in no hurry to present the evidence. But he considered the corruption accusations strong enough grounds to sack Mr Lepper, who yesterday raised the stakes with the threat of pulling out his party's other two ministers.
If the ministers left the government, it would almost certainly collapse, precipitating fresh elections. But after the threat was made, the Self-Defence party then changed its stance and said that it left the ministers' fate in Mr Kaczynski's hands.
Clearly what is under way is a game of chicken, with the Prime Minister daring the opposition to bring down the government, the opposition daring the Prime Minister to do the same, but each pulling back from the brink, tormented by fears that its hopes of improving its position after a sudden election are misplaced.
Mr Kaczynski originally fired Mr Lepper in September 2006, but then felt obliged to bring him back into the government to keep it alive.
The corruption allegations that have rocked the government originated with the Anti-Corruption Bureau (CBA) set up by the Kaczynski twins with the avowed aim of investigating corruption during the communist era, and cleaning up Poland's public life today.
When the agency was set up last year it was praised by Transparency International (TI), which monitors corruption in governments around the world. But now TI has changed its mind and dismisses the agency as "a propaganda machine of the government". "It's made a couple of spectacular arrests that played well in the media," said Jagoda Walorek of TI. "Other than that it's difficult to say what they do."
Mr Lepper described CBA as "a political police unit that exists for the protection of only one party, the main party."
There were hopes that the right-wing party, Law and Justice, led by Mr Kaczynski, would seek to transform itself into a centrist conservative party along the lines of Germany's Christian Democrats.
But its coalition partners, Self-Defence and the League of Polish Families, are the two most Eurosceptic and nationalist parties in Poland. Mr Kaczynski has sought to borrow their extremist ideas.
Marcin Zaborowski, a Polish expert at the European Union's Institute for Security Studies in Paris, said: "Mr Kaczynski has compromised too much with the far-right parties and the populist parties. He has alienated moderate voters." For example, he has failed to distance himself from anti-Semitic remarks made by a broadcaster close to the League of Polish Families.
Of Poland's apparently endless political crisis, the former president and the founder of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, said: "In my opinion there should be early elections, but I don't believe they will take place. Those people who are in power won't allow themselves to be pulled away from it so quickly."
