Hot spots: Poland.(INTERNATIONAL SECTION)

As a new member of the European Union, with an economy still in transition, Poland would have needed a strong new government; one representing a cross-section of the political spectrum which could truly speak for the nation as a whole. What emerged, instead, from last September's elections was a weak minority administration. On October 23, in the presidential run-off poll, voters picked Lech Kaczynski of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) to be the next president over his rival Donald Tusk from the pro-business Civic Platform (PO), coalition. Talks between the two parties, which had been suspended since the parliamentary poll on September 25, were resumed. It became clear fairly quickly, though, that the differences between the PiS and the PO were simply too great to be bridged.

PO came to the conclusion that it is better off letting the PiS form a fragile minority government, rather than share responsibility for a coalition over which it has little influence. Prime Minister-Designate Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz then formed just such an administration. Unfortunately, Law and Justice controls only 154 seats in the 460-member Sejm (parliament). To gain a voting majority for initiatives that the PO chooses not to support--and perhaps even to survive in office--it needs backing from such groups as the small Peasants party, the Right-wing, nationalist League of Polish Families, and the rabble-rousing Left-wing Self-Defense Party. Therefore, the new government has been greeted with strong misgivings in local and international financial & business communities and in the EU offices. Aware that its arrival on the scene has not pleased investors in Poland or abroad, or leading Eurocrats, newly installed PM Marcinkiewicz stressed, in remarks aimed at reassuring business, that he intends to move early and quickly on a number of ambitious, business-friendly reforms. He said he will take steps to reform the country's notoriously inefficient court system, stabilize public finances, reduce taxes, and step up investment in infrastructure.

However, prior to this, his Finance Minister, Teresa Lubinska, had given an interview to the Financial Times of London saying that social welfare spending must be protected while the state pumps more money into high-tech projects and general R&D. She indicated that she saw no problem with the country's unmanageable system of disability payments (13 percent of working-age people are recipients of such payments) and vowed that she would fight for a larger budget deficit than that proposed by the rest of the government.

Worried about the reaction from business and among Poland's new EU partners, Marcinkiewicz rushed to order members of his Cabinet to stop giving media interviews. But by that time it had already become evident that the Right wing of the governing Law and Justice Party had taken advantage of the absence of the liberal Civic Platform in the coalition to start pursuing a radical agenda to get ex-Communists out of the police and security services. The PiS had lost no time taking over the intelligence services, the Interior ...