Poland To Overturn Election Results And Oust 700 Democratically Elected Officials

Warsaw, Poland 27 January, 2007 Poland's Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski is planning to overturn election victories for over 700 Polish local government officials in order to get control of Warsaw, Poland. After threatening to use force to remove Warsaw's President, Hanna Gronkiewicz Walcz, he is now moving forward administratively to force Warsaw, and the country, into new elections. See Polish Prime Minister Threatens Force To Remove Warsaw President

After the first face to face meeting in a year with opposition party Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk, he announced that he would not agree to amending retroactively an election law, considered by many as probably constitutionally flawed, and would seek the removal and replacement of Warsaw's newly elected President Hanna Gronkiewicz-Walcz. He said that if the matter went to the courts they would continue planning the elections.

According to political commentators, Kaczynski does not want to force the replacement of 700 locally elected officials by temporary administrators who would serve only until the new elections. So he is delaying replacement until new elections.

Kaczynski acknowledged that the elections would be very expensive.

When confronted with the fact that when his brother and now President of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, left his position of President of Warsaw after winning the presidential election, Jaroslaw Kaczynski ruled against new elections in Warsaw because they would be too expensive, he said that there were costs to democracy.

Commentators point out that when he had the advantage, elections in Warsaw alone were too expensive. Now when he is at a disadvantage, elections for 700 officials all over Poland, which will be much more expensive, are not.

Hanna Gronkiewicz-Walcz, at a somewhat raucous Warsaw City Board meeting held in Warsaw's Government Offices in the Palace of Culture, apologized to the voters for having filed her husbands financial statement 10 hours late. She said that she thought she was filing a week early. It is this late filing that, under the new election law, she has supposedly lost her mandate to govern.

Gronkiewicz-Walcz intends to take the matter to the courts. She claims, among other things, that she did not even have to file her husbands financial statement.

Kaczynski does not yet have a candidate to run in the new Warsaw elections.
Source:masterpage.com.pl