Editor's note: Markets quake in elections' wake

Indeed - what we've witnessed in Poland in the last few weeks could not have been predicted by even the worst pessimists. The government is being formed in painful circumstances. In the first days after the elections politicians served us a bitter pill, with coalition negotiations dogged by utterly cynical and populist party quarrels.

No wonder. The elections - both parliamentary and presidential - were won by Law and Justice (PiS). The party scorns liberalism, divides Poles into those who are successful and 'the excluded', who need state support.

The situation is slowly slipping out of control. When the word "panic" appears on the market, investors' moods turn black. The Polish financial market hasn't gone through such a breakdown for a long time - let's hope it's only temporary. The stock-exchange indices are falling, investors are selling Polish bonds en masse, and the złoty is getting weaker.

The reason? Investors dislike populists because they simply don't believe them. They don't believe in the economic welfare of a country that wants to base its economy on such slogans as "we'll build three million flats."

The foreign economic press made its feelings plain reporting: "in the last parliamentary and presidential elections the majority of votes went to the party that is in favor of a strong state and is very suspicious of the last 15 years of free-market reform."

We can't do anything but wait for the situation to stabilize and the coalition to eventually come into existence - unfortunately, the bigger the probability of forming a minority government, the more losses will be suffered by the Polish złoty and the bourse. Investors are afraid of the ad hoc PiS coalition with Self-defense and the League of Polish Families (LPR) because it will slow down the reform of public finances and the adoption of the euro. And there's nothing worse for the Polish economy than investors' fear. Maybe Law and Justice will get just a little bit frightened by how the markets react to their actions.

Eliza Durka

Editor-in-chief