Tusk seals Polish coalition talks

Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister-designate who won snap elections on 21 October, says he is ready to clinch a coalition deal between his party – the centre-right Civic Platform – and the smaller Polish Peasants’ Party.

Tusk told reporters on 30 October that coalition talks were “practically finished”. He added that he wanted to give three ministries to the centrist and pro-EU Polish Peasants’ Party and make its leader and former prime minister Waldemar Pawlak his new economy minister.

The new coalition is expected to take on a more business-friendly and pro-European direction. Civic Platform promised during its campaign that it would seek pro-business reforms, such as privatisation in the areas of energy, telecoms and Poland’s national airline. The party also said it wants to adopt the euro, possibly as early as 2012-2013.

Civic Platform had won 209 out of 460 seats in the Polish elections on 21 October. Together with the 31 seats of the Polish Peasants’ Party, they will hold a majority in parliament. Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, whose Law and Justice Party suffered a major defeat, said he would step down on 5 November.

Early elections had been called after a fallout between the main coalition partners of Kaczynski’s rule, in place since 2005. The EU had hailed the election outcome in the hope of improving relations with Poland, which has been following an increasingly Eurosceptic path recently and even threatened to scupper a deal on EU institutional reform in June.

The new government awaits approval by parliament and the president, Lech Kaczynski. After initially refusing to comment on the election outcome, President Kaczynski finally admitted on 30 October: “It is obvious that if the Civic Platform forms a parliamentary majority, Donald Tusk will become prime minister.”

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