Under starters orders
By : Marek Matraszek
After much anticipation on all political sides, the government of Leszek Miller is finally taking shape. Only a week remains before the new ministers formally take their offices, at the first session of Parliament on Oct. 19, but last Thursday, prime minister Miller already announced his cabinet lineup. What does it tell us about the next four years?
Although the government is a coalition between the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) and the Polish Peasants Party (PSL), the ministers as announced bear the stamp of Millers personal authority. The PSL itself has acquired just two ministries agriculture and environment although its leader Jarosław Kalinowski obtains the key additional function of deputy prime minister. Some are concerned that this means he will be able to limit the effectiveness of Finance Minister Marek Belka, who is also deputy prime minister. However, Belka has made it clear that he considers himself first among equals, that if there is a true deputy prime minister, it is him and not either Kalinowski or Marek Pol, who is the third to possess that title while still being the infrastructure minister.
In the previous government of Jerzy Buzek, and in fact in most prior administrations, it was the economy minister that often became one of the focal points of resistance to the Finance Ministry, representing as it did the vested interests of Polands heavy industries and inefficient economic sectors. Significantly, the new economy minister, Jacek Piechota, is not also deputy prime minister, which was a status accorded to outgoing minister, Janusz Steinhoff. For his part, Piechota is very much the politician to watch in the SLD. He is relatively young, and has acquired a reputation as a genuinely non-ideological pragmatist, and his nomination as economy minister may well mean that his role will be to tame the more reactionary bureaucrats entrenched in that ministry and allow for easier cooperation with Belkas Finance Ministry. Smart money is also going on Piechota as the next SLD leader, once Miller, now 54, decides to pass the baton in anywhere up to eight years time.
Miller has taken the opportunity of the new governments formation to take advantage of his statutory powers and shake up the structure of government itself. There are fewer ministries, and the Infrastructure Ministry has been created by conflating the functions of the old ministries of transport, communications, as well as other duties including housing construction. The cumbersome interministerial governmental committees (defense, economics, and so on) have been abolished and replaced by a single internal governmental review committee made up of ministerial secretaries of state. European affairs have been brought more closely under the control of the Foreign Ministry through the abolition of the Office of European Integration and the transfer of its duties to a new deputy minister of foreign affairs. Finally, Miller has announced plans to undertake a major reform of the intelligence services, creating new internal and external intelligence agencies and placing them much more closely under prime ministerial control.
Ultimately, however, this is Millers show. The streamlining of government, the nomination of ministers chosen for their competency rather than their factional allegiances, and the removal of superfluous layers of bureaucracy within the government itself will make the effecting of executive decision much easier. At the same time, Poland is about to receive a prime minister who has no qualms in telling people that he is in charge and that he intends to take no quarter in putting his program into practice. That is the good news. The more uncertain aspect of the next few months is now that Miller has the power he has wanted, and the ability to effect his decisions, what are the specific responses he will make to the looming financial crisis that threatens to engulf the country? How will he tackle the paradox of seeking rapid entry to the European Union (EU), with a PSL minister in charge of agriculture? How will he display leadership in the coming months and possibly years of international crisis and NATOs response to terrorism? Those decisions, moreover, are just for starters. One thing is clear, however: Miller has placed himself in a position of strong executive power, and the verdict four years from now will be not only over the SLD-PSL coalition, but also of Miller himself.
Marek Matraszek is Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl (mailto:director@cec.com.pl)
