Polish election winners move to craft new Cabinet

Poland’s centrist Prime Minister Donald Tusk moved yesterday to craft a new Administration with his coalition allies, after securing a landmark second term in a general election.

Near-complete results showed Mr Tusk’s Civic Platform obtaining 206 seats in the country’s 460-member chamber, down from 208 in the outgoing Parliament.

Junior coalition partner the Polish People’s Party scored 30, down from 31. The combined 236 seats were three fewer than the coalition’s previous majority.

With Mr Tusk widely expected to reshuffle his government, the coalition players will now have to settle the share-out of ministries.

“I’ve scheduled a meeting with the prime minister for discussions,” Grzegorz Schetyna, the Parliament speaker and Mr Tusk ally said.

“We’ll lay everything out, consider and, and then we’ll see.”

President Bronislaw Komorowski, a former PO kingpin, said the result “opened a new era in Polish democracy”.

No incumbent government had won a new mandate since Poland’s communist regime fell in 1989.

In six votes since then, power has swung between the left, centre and conservative right.

In a 2007 snap election, disgruntled Poles voted out the conservative Law and Justice party’s fractious, two-year-old coalition with the far-right and populists and handed power to Mr Tusk.

“Stability, at last,” headlined the centre-right daily DGP yesterday.

“As the global financial system stumbles and the world economy sinks under the weight of debt, we have cause to celebrate,” it said. “We at last know what to expect from our government.”

Poland joined the EU in 2004 and currently holds the 27-nation bloc’s six-month Presidency, boosting Mr Tusk’s prestige as the nation of 38 million seeks to assert itself as a continental heavyweight.

With Poland having kept recession at bay, Mr Tusk’s campaign centred on his image as a safe pair of hands.

Poland’s economy expanded 1.7 per cent in 2009 which, while a shadow of the rates recorded in previous years, still made it the only EU member to have growth.

The 2010 rate was 3.8 per cent. This year’s forecast is four per cent, and for 2012, 2.7 per cent.

Poland is not in the eurozone, but with its main trade partners part of the debt-stricken currency union, jitters remain. Tusk pledges to keep cutting the budget deficit to offset the risks.

“The coming four years will see an even more crucial challenge, because we will have to work twice as hard and act twice as fast,” Mr Tusk said late Sunday.

PiS, led by ex-Premier Jaroslaw Kaczynski, obtained 157 seats, improving on its previous score of 146.

“We remain convinced that Poland wants major change,” Mr Kaczynski said. “We need to convince millions of Poles.”

PiS made headway with a campaign centred on issues such as inflation, pensions and healthcare, saying ordinary Poles deserve better. Highly divisive on the domestic scene, Mr Kaczynski and his identical twin president Lech Kaczynski, elected in 2005, also clashed regularly with Poland’s EU allies.

Mr Lech was killed in a plane crash in Russia in April last year, and Komorowski beat Jaroslaw in a snap presidential election.

Mr Komorowski on Sunday urged the country’s sparring political camps to put aside the divisions of the general election campaign.

“Now the battle is over, tomorrow we will have to find our bearings in one Poland, our common motherland,” he said.

Mr Tusk, who has mended fences abroad since 2007, rebuked Mr Kaczynski last week for claiming that Germany aimed to subjugate Poland hand-in-hand with Russia.

The election’s big surprise was the new Palikot Movement of flamboyant former vodka tycoon and ex-PO member Janusz Palikot, which stormed into Parliament with 40 seats.