Godlike Productions - News: Opposition Wins Polish Election, Seeks Closer EU Ties

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Opposition Wins Polish Election, Seeks Closer EU Ties

Bloomberg

2007-10-22

Polish opposition party Citizens' Platform won yesterday's general election, ousting the two-year-old Law & Justice administration and promising to move closer ``to the heart'' of the European Union. The zloty and bonds rose.

The Platform won 41.6 percent of the vote, according to the State Election Committee, with 90.9 percent of votes counted. Law & Justice, which has governed since 2005, gained 32 percent.

``A clear pro-European option won, the option that prefers a cosmopolitan and liberal view above the xenophobic and rather historical mentality,'' said Radoslaw Markowski, a political scientist at the Polish Academy of Science.

Platform leader Donald Tusk, 50, who unsuccessfully ran for the presidency in 2005 and led his party to defeat in parliamentary elections the same year, will have to seek partners to govern. The Platform is set to have 208 members in the 460-seat parliament and Law & Justice 164. Tusk said last night he may team up with the Polish Peasants Party as the two have cooperated at a local level.

The Peasants Party won 8.8 percent of the vote, giving it 35 lawmakers, enough to help Tusk form a majority. The Left and Democrats won 13.2 percent, or 52 seats. Self Defense and the Polish Families League, coalition partners of Law & Justice for most of the last two years, failed to meet the 5 percent threshold for representation in the Parliament. The turnout was 53.8 percent.

The zloty strengthened to 3.6840 as of 10:56 a.m. in Warsaw from 3.692 on Oct. 19. The price of the benchmark zero-coupon two- year government bond rose 0.1 percent.

`More Focused'

``Citizens' Platform will clearly come with an agenda much more focused on and much more beneficial for the economy, so the immediate market reaction could be very positive,'' said Jacek Wisniewski, chief economist at Raiffeisen Bank in Warsaw, by phone.

Standard & Poor's said the election result ``opens the possibility of the formation of a more reform-oriented and fiscally more conservative government, which could ultimately benefit the ratings.'' The result had no immediate impact on the country's rating, the ratings company said.

While the economy is booming, with growth accelerating to the fastest pace in a decade in the first quarter, economists say Law & Justice curtailed growth by raising pensions for miners and others, increasing the minimum wage, cutting taxes for families and stalling the sale of state assets.

European `Heart'

Citizens' Platform plans to revive the state-asset sale program and make it easier to set up businesses and slim down government bureaucracy.

``We'll be a determined opposition,'' said Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Warsaw. ``And we'll be keeping a careful eye on the Platform and its promises.''

Over the last two years, the government has fallen out with most of its partners in the European Union, which Poland joined in 2004. Relations with its two neighbors, Germany and Russia, are particularly strained.

``The Platform now has to ensure that Polish politics is led back to the heart of European integration and away from the margins that Law & Justice has pushed it into,'' Platform Deputy Chairman Bronislaw Komorowski said last night.

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