Polish coalition survives crisis

WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland's shaky government survived the latest political crisis on Monday when two junior coalition parties abandoned their threat to walk out and bring forward early elections.

The rural leftist Self-Defence party and far-right League of Polish Families kept the possibility of early polls alive though by announcing they were merging to fight the next elections on an anti-European and anti-reform platform.

"We hereby declare that a new party is being formed," Self-Defence leader Andrzej Lepper told a joint news conference with League chief Roman Giertych.

The new party, to be registered soon, would be called League and Self-Defence (LiS).

Conservative Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski plunged the biggest ex-communist European Union nation into political turmoil last week when he fired firebrand Lepper as deputy premier and farm minister over a corruption probe.

Lepper has protested his innocence, saying the probe into a land deal that proved to be a sting operation by the anti-corruption police, sought to remove him from politics.

He initially threatened to quit the coalition, which would have deprived Kaczynski of his majority in parliament, but then kept Poles and foreign investors in Poland's fast growing economy guessing about his true intentions.

His party voted several times to leave or stay, only to declare on Monday, the eve of a 6-week parliamentary recess, that staying on was a patriotic duty.

"We have been badly hurt but we have to rise above ambition because it's about Poland," Lepper said.

The alliance with the League would give both parties clout in dealing with Kaczynski's Law and Justice, Lepper said. Polls show both the smaller parties balanced near the 5-percent threshold needed to enter parliament.

"Right from the start our two parties agreed on pro-social, pro-family policies," Lepper said.

TOUGH ON EU

His partner Giertych said the new party's agenda would be opposition to a new European Union treaty. Other EU leaders want the treaty approved by the end of the year and are already exasperated by Polish demands for changes.

Giertych, who told Reuters on Friday that the new constitution would seal German domination of the EU and Poland, said the new party would demand a referendum on the matter.

He urged Kaczynski, himself a Eurosceptic, to take a tough line against the EU in disputes such as aid to shipyards and Baltic fishing limits.

"The formation of the new party gives us a chance to block Poland's consent to decisions made in Brussels," he said.

Asked to comment on the rhetoric of his coalition partners, Kaczynski signalled he believed the treaty would be ratified by parliament with the help of pro-EU opposition parties.

Analysts said, however, that a confident alliance of his partners would be problematic for Kaczynski in the months ahead, when negotiations are expected to start in earnest over the 2008 budget, key to Poland's plans for adopting the euro currency.

"This gives Law and Justice a headache because both parties will undermine the government from within more effectively," said Kazimierz Kik, a sociology professor at the Swietokrzyska Academy in central Poland.

Source: swissinfo.org