POLAND: Poland narrowly avoided early elections yesterday after the Prime Minister, Mr Marek Belka, won a last-chance confidence motion, writes Derek Scally in Berlin.
Mr Belka (52) now assumes office with a new left-wing government and a mandate to implement severe austerity measures and tackle high unemployment.
"We must combine attempts to rationalise public finances and take into account the needs and hopes of those who require the most help," said Mr Belka, a one-time finance minister under his predecessor, Mr Leszek Miller.
Mr Belka said he would call another confidence motion after submitting next year's budget in October. He also announced a "significant reduction" by early 2005 of the number of Polish troops in Iraq.
The new government includes seven ministers from the last administration, including the Economics Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Jerzy Hausner, and the Foreign Minister, Mr Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz.
Corruption scandals and a coalition split drove Mr Miller from office iMay, less than three years after taking power and a day after Poland's EU accession, when support for his Democratic SLD party slipped badly.
President Aleksander Kwasniewski asked Mr Belka to be his Prime Minister-designate. Mr Belka returned to Warsaw immediately from Iraq where he was working as an economic expert with the US-led forces.
He lost a first-round vote last month but this week secured the vital backing of Polish Social Democracy (SDPL), a party that split from the ruling SLD earlier this year.
"A three-month contract is an honest proposal," said Mr Marek Borowski, the leader of the SDPL, but he warned that his party's support for the government might be temporary. The lower house of parliament, the Sejm, approved the government led by Mr Belka by 236 votes to 215, with one abstention.
In his speech to the Sejm yesterday, Mr Belka seemed to be betting that Poland's current strong economic performance would soon have a knock-on effect on employment figures in the coming months and revive the SLD's popularity.
"When I hand over to the next government, I will be able to say that the social and economic situation has improved," he said.
Mr Belka is known as an easy-going professor from the liberal wing of the SLD, and for not shying away from painful economic decisions.
He resigned as finance minister two years ago after the government failed to adopt his proposed belt-tightening measures.
"I often repeated that if a minister of finance is liked, then he is a bad minister," he said at the time of his resignation.
However, there were worries yesterday that Mr Belka's impeccable economic credentials will not be enough to master the sometimes chaotic world of Polish party politics.
"He is a well-known economist but he is not a party leader. That could be a problem in the coming months," said Dr Robert Sobiech, a political scientist at the University of Warsaw.