There they go again
Of course, we knew it couldn't last the much-trumpeted coalition agreement from a couple of weeks back, which was supposed to have laid the foundations for stress-free relations between the governing coalition parties of Solidarity Election Action (AWS) and Freedom Union (UW). Last week's set of rows shows how potentially fragile that agreement is, and with it, the coherence of the government itself.
The latest inner-governmental row to emerge concerned the perilous state of government legislation designed to revamp Poland's tax rates and tax system. The set of bills has long been the pet project of Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz (UW), who specifically included a commitment in the coalition agreement signed with AWS that Parliament pass the legislation. Now it has emerged that the legislation has become bogged down in the Parliament's finance committee, headed by the newly controversial Henryk Goryszewski. Balcerowicz is furious that for crucial committee meetings on his legislation, few AWS MPs are showing up, often causing the meetings to be adjourned for lack of quorum. Unless Parliament passes the bills in November, they will fail to be on the stature book by January, together with the plan to have the reform in operation next year.
Balcerowicz suspects the bills are being deliberately sabotaged by AWS, which is in no mood to do Balcerowicz any favors and whose senior politicians have cold feet over reforms of any description. Last week Balcerowicz swung into action by stating that the failure of the AWS to support the push of government bills was evidence that AWS was not delivering on promises that Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek and AWS leader Marian Krzaklewski had made to him, and were resulting in yet another rethink in the UW as to the sense of remaining in the coalition. Balcerowicz also fingered committee leader Goryszewski as responsible for failing to discipline wayward committee members. That puts Goryszewski under even more pressure in a week of further accusations of impropriety arising from Goryszewski's dual role as committee head and legal adviser to Polish companies seeking to avoid making tax payments to the state treasury.
Much more dramatic as a rupture in coalition relations, however, came last week with Prime Minister Buzek's decision to put on enforced leave the outspoken head of the Government Strategic Studies Center, Minister Jerzy Kropiwnicki, who in public statements last week undermined the credibility of Balcerowicz by publishing a bleak economic forecast for the economy in 2000, which just happened to coincide with a further slump in the already embattled zloty. Independent economists, as well as the head of the National Bank of Poland's (NBP) Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, and of course Balcerowicz, all agreed that Kropiwnicki's comments had been the cause. They infuriated Balcerowicz, who called an emergency meeting of the UW's ruling council to discuss the possibility of leaving the coalition altogether.
Kropiwnicki has long been the bete noir of Balcerowicz, using every opportunity to criticize the finance minister on this or that aspect of macro-economic policy. Balcerowicz has a deep loathing for Kropiwnicki, seeing the latter as a closet socialist in right-wing clothing. Indeed, much of Kropiwnicki's economic analysis is based in 1960s-style Keynesian economics, that see the solution to a country's economic problems in higher government spending and currency devaluation.
The immediate tension was defused by Buzek's decision to put Kropiwnicki on an enforced leave of absence. But no sooner than Balcerowicz had attacked Kropiwnicki, did Kropiwnicki's own party, the Christian-National Union (ZChN), leap to their man's defense. Many ZChN members view the treatment of Kropiwnicki as a test of whether they can continue to support Buzek at a time when more and more right-wing politicians in AWS are beginning to ask whether sustaining Buzek in power is not the political version of a suicide note for AWS. ZChN leaders such as Michal Kaminski and Stefan Niesiolowski both suggested that sacking Kropiwnicki would be Buzek's last act as prime minister.
Until now Buzek has managed to survive such conflicts by sitting on the fence. But it is becoming increasingly clear that sooner or later an issue will emerge where a decision has to be made, but which will lead to inevitable conflict. The case of Kropiwnicki may well be that turning point: keep Kropiwnicki and Balcerowicz goes, or sack the man, and AWS fragments. Not an envious position for the prime minister to be in. A more determined leadership earlier on might have prevented such squabbles from developing into festering political sores, but now it may be too late to prevent the final disintegration of the Buzek government.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw Director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl
