Poland’s prime minister: Quitting

An unpopular Leszek Miller is leaving the stage

BY RESIGNING on May 2nd as Poland's prime minister, Leszek Miller may hope to go while his support is still high in single figures. He may even get a brief lift from Poland's entry into the European Union the previous day, allowing him to end a miserable two-and-a-half years in office on a slightly optimistic note. His ruling socialist party, the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), hopes to cling on to power - but it will need luck. The SLD is a minority government already, a splinter group has weakened it further, and the opposition is baying for early elections.

Early elections might be the best outcome, were it not for the threat from Samoobrona (Self-Defence), a potato-throwing, bigoted and fiscally irresponsible farmers' movement that is one of Poland's two most popular parties. Under its tough-talking leader, Andrzej Lepper, Samoobrona has gone from 10% support in the 2001 election to over twice that in recent polls, thanks to its appeal to those whom Poland's economic reforms have left poor and angry. Samoobrona is neck and neck with the leading opposition party, the centre-right Civic Platform.

Mr Miller owes his fall to a walk-out by 22 of his party's parliamentary members. They left the SLD, successor to Poland's communist party, to start a new left-wing party called Polish Social Democracy. The SLD, already weakened by earlier defections, now has fewer than 200 of the parliament's 460 members. The defectors panicked over Mr Miller's plummeting popularity. Their party faced humiliating defeat in the next election, after winning the previous one with 41% of the vote.

Sleaze is partly responsible, as SLD bigwigs have been implicated in one corruption scandal after another. But voters have been alienated even more by the government's handling of the economy. Struggling against slow growth and high unemployment, Mr Miller has chopped and changed policies and ministers, only to end up with a very bad mix.

Thanks to his economics minister, Jerzy Hausner, Mr Miller found himself stuck with high public spending this year, much of it on wasteful social-security schemes that Poland does not need and cannot afford. Mr Hausner's next idea was to recoup this largesse through spending cuts and tax rises, which turned off the government's few remaining supporters.

Whoever takes over from Mr Miller will have to drink from this poisoned chalice. Constitutional limits on public borrowing make big spending cuts almost inevitable. President Aleksander Kwasniewski has kindly proposed his former economic adviser, Marek Belka, for the job. Mr Belka was Mr Miller's finance minister in 2001-02, but resigned after eight months, claiming “exhaustion”. For the past year he has been running economic policy for the American-led administration in Iraq.

Mr Belka will have two weeks after May 2nd to win a parliamentary vote of confidence. If he fails, parliament gets another two weeks to choose an alternative; if it fails, Mr Kwasniewski has a second try at naming a prime minister, before calling an election. An election that returned Civic Platform at the head of a new coalition government would be fine. The new Social Democrats might find a place too, or they might use a few years in opposition to take over as the main party of the left. But the aim for all responsible parties should be to contain Mr Lepper.

Leszek Miller, Prime Minister of Poland, has announced he will resign with effect from 2 May 2004.