Poland in the 21st century

In the presidential election of 2000, Aleksander Kwasniewski, the incumbent former leader of the post-communist SLD, was re-elected in the first round of voting, with 53.9% of the popular vote. A leading issue in the subsequent years was negotiations with the European Union regarding accession and internal preparation for this. Poland joined the EU in May 2004. Both President Kwasniewski and the government were vocal in their support for this cause. The only party decidedly opposed to EU entry was the populist right-wing League of Polish Families (LPR). Despite broad popular support for joining the EU, which was considered an overriding issue, the government rapidly lost popularity due to incompetence on various issues (e.g. building of motorways, and a botched reform of the health system), a general economic slump, and numerous corruption scandals. In the autumn of 2005 Poles voted in both parliamentary and presidential elections. September's parliamentary poll was expected to produce a coalition of two centre-right parties, PiS (Law and Justice) and PO(Citizens Platform). During the increasingly bitter campaign, however, PiS launched a strong attack on the liberal economic policies of their allies and overtook PO in opinion polls. PiS eventually gained 27% of votes cast and became the largest party in the Sejm ahead of PO on 24%. Presidential elections in October followed a similar script. The early favourite, Donald Tusk, leader of the PO, saw his opinion poll lead slip away and was beaten 54% to 46% in the second round by the PiS candidate Lech Kaczynski. Coalition talks ensued simultaneously with the presidential elections. However, the severity of the campaign attacks and the willingness of PiS to court the populist vote had soured the relationship between the two largest parties and made the creation of a stable coalition impossible. The ostensible stumbling blocks were the insistence of PiS that it control all aspects of law enforcement: the Ministries of Justice and Internal Affairs, and the special forces; as well as the forcing through of a PiS candidate for the head of the Sejm with help of several smaller populist parties. The PO decided to go into opposition. PiS then formed a minority government with the previously little-known Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz as Prime Minister. This has since relied on the tacit and rather stable support of smaller populist and agrarian parties (PSL, Samoobrona, LPR) to govern. The new government has enjoyed quite strong public support (as is, in fact, generally common in the first few months after an election), while the popularity of the populist parties giving it support has significantly waned. With this background, a parliamentary crisis appeared to loom in January 2006, with these small populist parties fearing that PiS was about to force new elections (on which they would lose out) by using the pretext of failing to pass the budget within the constitutional timeframe. However, this crisis appears to have abated..