POLAND: Analyst says no-one is the winner in Polish local elections, which saw setbacks for the ruling conservatives

Poland's ruling conservatives suffered a series of setbacks in local elections on Sunday (November 12, 2006) but appeared strong enough to weather any opposition challenge and carry on in government for some time to come, analysts said. Exit polls said Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski's ruling Law and Justice Party lost the race for Warsaw city council and its candidate for mayor got fewer votes than forecast, pointing to defeat in second-round polls on November 26. The ruling party was also behind in the race for the city councils of Lodz, Poznan and Krakow, the polls suggested. But the party's candidate for mayor in Lodz, Poland's second city, appeared to be doing better than expected, taking about 35 percent of the vote, compared with a forecast 30 percent. Analysts said the results appeared to show that the ruling party had lost some urban voters but that the opposition lacked enough support to topple the government, in power for a year which has seen strong economic growth of around 5 percent. Jacek Zakowski of the Polish political magazine, Polityke Weekly said on Monday (November 13) that the election had produced no winners. "I would say nobody won the election and almost everybody lost. PIS (Law and Justice Party), the government, lost big cities and Liberal opposition lost little towns, the country people and so on. So there's still the very beginning of the fight." National turnout appeared to be in line with previous local elections at between 40 and 50 percent. Early indications had suggested the vote might be much lower. Kaczynski's party took power a year ago promising to dismantle what he said was a web of corrupt businessmen and former communists which had dominated Poland since the end of communism in 1989. But his coalition with two fringe parties has been hamstrung by infighting. The election comes just a month after a budget row nearly took down his government, temporarily handing the opposition Civic Platform a big lead in the polls. A large defeat on Sunday could have weakened Kaczynski's authority, analysts said, while a very good result might have encouraged him to abandon the coalition altogether and call an early general election. The exit polls suggested neither outcome was likely -- a result that would probably please financial markets, which were steady in the run-up to the polls. Most dealers had expected no party to gain a decisive victory. The vote has extra significance two years after Poland joined the European Union because the winners will have a decisive say on how billions of euros from EU funds are spent on infrastructure projects over the next four years. Just over 30 million people were eligible to vote to fill mayoral posts in the cities and 46,790 councillors' posts in districts, towns and cities and in provincial assemblies. Final results from the first round of voting were expected by November

ITN Source | November 13, 2006

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