Polish government facing defeat

Prime Minister Buzek: Under fire over economy and floods

By Wojtek Kosc, Transitions Online

KATOWICE, Poland -- The Polish government faces election defeat after a summer marred by a slowing economy, massive flooding in the countryside and public finances apparently slipping out of control.

Parliamentary elections take place on Sunday, the fifth since 1989, and the country's main opposition coalition is likely to romp home.

Polls give the opposition centre-left coalition, the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) and Labour Union (UP), just under 50 percent support.

If those predictions are accurate, the coalition will gain an absolute majority in the Sejm, the Polish parliament.

So far no government has survived more than one parliamentary term and the current one, the centre-right coalition of Solidarity Electoral Action of the Right (AWSP), led by Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek, has a lot to do to change that record.

The elections could be the final nail in the coffin of the coalition hinged around Solidarity, the party so influential in Poland's democratic transformation.

Summer flooding brought chaos across the countryside

The coalition might not get over the required threshold of eight percent of the votes to secure a place in the Sejm -- the figure for individual parties is five percent.

Solidarity's support is down to seven percent, partly because the government has been rattled by several corruption scandals.

Support for the two new centre-right parties that have emerged with Solidarity's demise -- the Civic Platform and Law and Justice -- are getting about 10-12 percent of the vote, according to polls. The Polish Peasants' Party is attracting a similar level of support.

In the parliamentary elections four years ago, huge floods prompted the demise of the coalition government of the Democratic Left Alliance and the Polish Peasants Party.

This year, floods have once again ravaged southern parts of the country and have become an election issue. The SLD-UP has accused Buzek's government of doing little to prevent the disaster.

It's the economy

The SLD-UP has campaigned on a simple platform, aiming to end "four years of misery that the current government inflicted on Poles," as SLD leader and likely future prime minister Leszek Miller put it.

Importantly, the popular President Aleksander Kwasniewski is an SLD man. That will certainly help the SLD if it wins power, since it will have to worry about trouble from the head of state.

The main election issue is Poland's ailing economy. The country, for years one of the economic leaders in central Europe, has record-high unemployment at around 16 percent and economic growth is slowing.

Last year, the country had 4.1 percent real annual growth but the government foresees this slowing to 2.3-2.5 percent this year.

The situation has contributed to a gloomy mood in the country at large. An opinion poll conducted by the Warsaw-based Pentor in the summer found that 58 percent of respondents considered the economic situation to be negative, while only seven percent said it was positive.

Another poll by the Warsaw-based Public Opinion Research Centre in August found that 75 percent of respondents said the country was heading in the wrong direction.

Analysts say that with the European Union (EU) leaning over the country's shoulder, Poland's economic policy is unlikely to change dramatically if the opposition coalition wins power and that the SLD's financial policy would not be a dramatic break from the past -- in other words pro-market, with a few tweaks here and there.

Virtually the only big issue that all main parties agree on is accession into the EU. In August, most party leaders signed an agreement on unanimous support for joining the 15-nation union.