POLAND: Eye on Coalition, Pres.-Elect Turns Conciliatory

By Pavol Stracansky Reprint | | Print |

Analysis by Pavol Stracansky

WARSAW, Oct 24 2005 (IPS) - Early signs since Lech Kaczynski was announced the surprise winner of Sunday’s run-off election suggest that his presidency will be as closely watched in Washington, Moscow, Berlin and Brussels as it will be by Polish voters and politicians.

Kaczynski, of the Law and Justice Party, which narrowly won parliamentary elections last month, beat Donald Tusk, of the liberal Civic Platform, getting 54 percent to Tusk’s 46 percent of votes cast, despite polls just a week ago putting him well behind his opponent.

He will take up a post that has a limited role domestically, despite its veto power over legislation, but which commands relatively broad authority in deciding foreign policy.

Within hours of the vote count, the president-elect (currently Warsaw’s mayor) seems to have offered hope that he can shore up differences between the fledgling government and coalition parties.

Kaczynski also sent a clear signal that his foreign policy will be aimed as much at cementing a burgeoning trans-Atlantic partnership as at Poland’s interests in Europe.

Kaczynski, whose identical twin brother Jaroslaw is head of the conservative Law and Justice Party, ran an election campaign that largely backed up his party’s parliamentary campaign: pledges to root out corruption at government and state administration levels and to push for a complete break with the country’s communist legacy.

Following the fall of the communist regime in 1989, many communists have been seen to have profited as much, if not more, than most from Poland’s transition to democracy and the free market, using connections made under the former regime to move into positions of power in politics and business.

Kaczynski also appealed to the populist vote, claiming many people had not reaped the benefits of capitalist reforms, with Poland having the highest unemployment rate in the European Union – 18 percent – and portrayed Tusk and his party as rampant free-marketeers with little or no concern for people’s welfare.

And he wooed the conservative voters in a country where the Catholic Church wields strong influence over society. He and the Law and Justice Party campaigned on “traditional family values”, and in the past, as Warsaw’s mayor, he won the backing of some by refusing to allow gay parades in the city.

But his robust electioneering against his opponent and the Civic Platform had stalled the talks on forming a government with that party, and there were question marks over whether or not they would ever be able to get back on track.

But immediately after his victory Kaczynski openly praised Tusk and his campaign and said he wanted talks on forming a government to resume as quickly as possible – an offer apparently heeded, because on Monday both the Civic Platform and the Law and Justice Party announced the talks were back on.

The statement may not bring about an immediate reconciliation of fundamental differences between the two parties, but it is a hint that Kaczynski’s campaign rhetoric may have been no more than that – and that he will indeed work more at creating a stable government than promoting the interests of his own party.

He also appeared to have toned down, even if slightly, some of his hard-line foreign policy campaigning.

He had attacked Tusk as a man not just lean on experience in government but soft in defending Poland’s international interests.

Kaczynski’s campaigning had made prominent pledges to defend Polish interests within the EU and in the face of what many Poles see as overbearing neighbours in Russia and Germany.

Relations with Germany have historically been strained and, despite the fall of communism, have never been completely comfortable.

In his campaigning, Kaczynski made much of the fact that his father had fought against the Nazis, and in the past he has made public his calculations of the damage wrought on the Polish capital by the armies of the Third Reich. He also gained votes after pushing through the construction of a museum commemorating the failed 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Nazis.

Relations with Russia have been just as strained historically, and since Poland’s overt military and political support for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and after outgoing President Alexander Kwasniewski backed the pro-Western Victor Yushchenko in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution last year, those relations have become even frostier.

They have also been tainted by fears over perceived Russian attempts to tighten its grip on oil supplies to Western Europe. There are also fears in Warsaw over a joint German-Russian project to build a Baltic Sea gas pipeline that would bypass Poland.

Some observers believe this means the now strong relationship with the United States will take on a further dimension while Poland shores up its security as relations with Moscow get colder, and that the new president will be keen to foster the closest possible ties between Warsaw and Washington.

Indeed, Kaczynski told Polish media just hours after election results were confirmed that he wanted his first foreign visit to be to the United States, a sign as much for Poland as for Washington about where he feels his priorities lie.

The statement will have also have been noted in Brussels, capital of the EU. As one of Europe’s largest countries, with a population just under 40 million, Poland could become a major voice in the EU.

And Kaczynski, as the Law and Justice Party did in its parliamentary campaign, has positioned himself as a mild “Eurosceptic” who believes in Poland being part of the EU, but prepared to defend its interests in the face of larger European states.

He promised to make sure Poland was more assertive within the EU, and followed his party’s line that the country would no longer be dictated to by larger, older EU members.

Kaczynski and his party also played on concerns among ordinary Poles over what the introduction of the euro could mean to the economy and their daily lives. While the EU is hoping many new member states will bring the euro in as soon as their economies are ready, the Law and Justice Party is backing a wait-and-see approach, saying it will not support a referendum on the euro’s adoption before 2015, if at all.

Unless something dramatic happens, plans for an EU constitution are also unlikely to ever get Poland’s backing while Kaczynski is in power. He told Polish media late Sunday, after it emerged he had won the elections, “I don’t hide that I am against the European constitution project.”

Yet he again though offered an olive branch to Brussels when he said immediately afterwards that Poland’s first year in the EU had been “unquestionably good” – echoing the conciliatory tone he had taken with his presidential rival, and which could yet come to mark his term in office.