News Analysis: Democracy eluding newest EU members

The European Union's three newest members are in political and economic disarray, painful examples of the challenges faced by countries where traditions of parliamentary democracy and market economy are still struggling to take hold.

The result is that in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, much-needed reforms have been delayed, according to the EU and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Both institutions say that the three countries have yet to tackle pension and health systems that are running high deficits. With falling birth rates, they say, these problems will increase.

All three also must speed efforts to adopt the euro as their currency by introducing tighter fiscal and monetary measures, and accelerate investment of EU structural funds for improving the infrastructure and environment.

Poland's government is struggling to survive a no-confidence motion by the opposition Civic Platform on Tuesday.

Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński's conservative Law and Justice Party appeared determined to prevail.

"We have to see what happens in the coming hours," Joanna Zając, a spokeswoman for the government, said Monday. "We are expecting the opposition to try and call new elections through a no-confidence vote. Clearly, we want to muster enough parliamentary votes to defeat it."

The pro-business Civic Platform party, led by Donald Tusk, has outdistanced the nationalist-conservative government in recent opinion polls.

Similar political uncertainty is dogging the Czech Republic and Hungary, which joined the EU along with Poland in May 2004.

The Czech Republic has been without a government since June, when the two main parties, the Civic Democrats and the Social Democrats, won the same number of parliamentary seats. Since then, both parties has been able to attract the support of smaller partners to form a government, and have refused to establish a grand coalition.

In Hungary, the socialist government led by Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany is battling to have his economic reform program accepted by the public and revive his political credibility. After admitting he lied to the electorate over the damage his party had done to the economy since coming to power in 2002, Gyurcsany has seen his popularity slump, and tens of thousands of demonstrators have poured into the streets demanding his ouster. Gyurcsany survived a no-confidence earlier this month but has failed to calm the controversy surrounding his leadership.

Kaczynski, a former leader of the independent Solidarity movement, said last week that early elections would "derail the government's efforts to clean up public life." So far, however, Law and Justice has had made little headway in implementing its two main electoral promises: a radical overhaul of the security and intelligence services - vestiges of communist rule - and a program to stamp out corruption.

Kaczynski has spent most of the past year trying to keep his small coalition together; it consists of the nationalist League of Polish Families and the leftist-populist Self Defense party led by Andrzej Lepper.

After Lepper repeatedly broke ranks with the government and made new demands as his price for staying in the coalition, Kaczynski fired him last month as deputy prime minister and dismissed Self Defense from the government.

Since then, Kaczynski has been unable to enact reforms or even next year's budget. With calls by Civic Platform for new elections, Kaczynski renewed contacts with Lepper - a move that analysts said they were not convinced would bring stability to the government, even if Lepper accepted.

They also say that despite the differences in personalities and leadership styles in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, the two main political parties in each of these countries could break the deadlock by forming grand coalitions. But they say the main parties are unable to do so because of how they view compromise.

"The problem in the Czech Republic as in Poland is that neither side is prepared to make concessions," said Jan Kavan, a former Social Democratic Party legislator in the Czech Parliament and now adviser to the chairman of the foreign affairs committee. "Compromise is seen as tantamount to defeat. Yet when you think about it, 17 years since the collapse of the communist system is not a long time. It takes experience to create a culture of compromise."

George Schöpflin, a member of the European Parliament from Hungary's Fidesz party, said the heritage of communist regimes lingered.

"Everything was seen in terms of black and white. You are with us or against us," Schöpflin said. "The culture of compromise has not yet taken root in Hungary or indeed in the rest of Eastern Europe. There is still the politics of confrontation."
Source:By Judy Dempsey International Herald Tribune, iht.com