Polish Election 2010: Possible Political and Economic Implications (An Optimistic Scenario‪)‬

Bronislaw Komorowski, the candidate of the Civic Platform Party (Platforma Obywatelska) was inaugurated as the president of Poland on August 6, 2010. His election on July 4, 2010 (he succeeded President Lech Kaczynski who perished in the Smolensk air catastrophe on April 10, 2010) will doubtless influence the political course Poland will take in the forthcoming years. Komorowski won in a run-off with former prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski. In the first election Komorowski received 41.54 percent of the votes to Kaczynski's 36.46 percent. Grzegorz Napieralski, representing the Democratic Left Alliance, garnered 13.68 percent in the first round. Other eliminated candidates included Waldemar Pawlak of the PSL (1.75 percent), former Minister of both Foreign Affairs and Finance Andrzej Olechowski (1.44 percent), and Andrzej Lepper of Samoobrona (1.28 percent). In the second round of voting, Komorowski received 53.01 percent of the vote, while Kaczynski got 46.99 percent. Although a representative of a center-right party with ties to the Solidarity labor movement (he spent one month in jail in 1980), Komorowski is perceived as less conservative than his opponent who heads the Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc). Komorowski represents a party that bills itself as probusiness, opening him up to criticism that he has abandoned his proworker Solidarity roots. In contrast, Kaczynski was supported by the Solidarity Workers' Union and officially endorsed by its president, Janusz Sniadek. Kaczynski also received much support in the rural parts of Poland, especially in the south and southeast. The parties that these two candidates represented had formerly been partners in the coalition government with Jaroslaw Kaczynski as prime minister. The coalition fell apart when PiS lost the parliamentary election on November 5, 2007. As a result, Donald Tusk, who was defeated in his run for president by the late president Lech Kaczynski, became prime minister, a position he holds to this day.