Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki (left) with some members of his new government (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)
It is led by outgoing Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and has two weeks to win parliament’s trust, but it seems very unlikely that he will succeed
A new government led by outgoing Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki from the conservative Law and Justice party was sworn in in Poland on Monday. In all likelihood, the new government will not last longer than 14 days. Within these days it must be confirmed by a vote of confidence in Parliament, with Law and Justice being the party with the most seats but not an absolute majority. At that point, the opposition coalition, which won a majority in the Oct. 15 election, could choose its own candidate for prime minister.
With 191 out of 460 seats, Law and Justice cannot count on enough votes to gain trust. In the new parliament, however, the opposition coalition now has 248 seats. Several analysts and opposition politicians suspect that President Andrzej Duda – a former law and justice parliamentarian who has often remained very close to the party in recent years – has nevertheless asked Morawiecki to form a government that is doomed to fall To delay the moment This will allow the opposition to form its own government and in the meantime allow it to appoint people close to the law and justice to responsible extra-governmental roles, with the appointments drawn from the coalition , who won the elections. Last week, Morawiecki appointed people close to him as head of the national financial regulator.
Duda justified his choice by saying that he “respected the tradition of appointing a government formed by a candidate elected by the party that won the parliamentary elections.” The Law and Justice party is still the leading party in Poland by number of votes, but its share has fallen compared to 2019. In the parliamentary elections on October 15, it received 35.4 percent of the vote, not enough to form a majority in parliament, even in a coalition with the other far-right party Konfederacja, which had a disappointing result compared to the polls . No other party appears willing to support their government in parliament. The coalition of opposition parties, on the other hand, has 248 seats, well ahead of the 231 required for a majority, and would therefore have the votes to confirm confidence in its own government: the most likely candidate for prime minister is Donald Tusk, former Prime Minister from 2007 to 2014.
Morawiecki himself said that he was looking for partners with whom he could govern and that he was ready to implement some measures close to the opposition’s heart if they supported him, but the probability of this was “10 percent or even less “. The opposition coalition, although quite heterogeneous in terms of policy positions, is actually mainly made up of opposition to the outgoing government and is made up of parties that hold it responsible for the erosion of media and judicial freedom. have protected the rights of women and minorities and allowed widespread corruption. They also share a pro-European orientation, which is very far from Law and Justice’s positions on the European Union, which is still a very sensitive issue in Poland.
The new government plans to appoint many technical experts as ministers and the largest number of female ministers since Law and Justice came to power in 2015. Many of the Law and Justice politicians who have held ministerial posts in the last eight years are not states: the most accepted hypothesis, also cited by various newspapers, including the Associated Press, is that they are not associated with any government wanted to be brought, which is doomed to failure. Duda instead praised the decision to appoint various technical ministers who “were previously known as experts and worked on the second line.”
The opposition strongly criticized Duda’s decision: Marcin Kierwinski, parliamentarian for the liberal Citizens’ Coalition (KO), said in an interview that there had been a lot of talk in Poland about the fact that “we all know that it is a big farce” and “a race “ is against time.” Leszek Miller, who was Prime Minister of Poland from 2001 to 2004 and is now a member of the European Parliament, compared the duration of Morawiecki’s government to the life expectancy of a fly: “Morawiecki’s government will not even have time to turn into one to transform into a pupa instead of laying eggs.
Continue with the post