Junior partner's vote shows cracks in Poland's ruling coalition
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has called "unwise" the junior ruling coalition partner's decision to vote hand-in-hand with opposition on amendments to a government bill.
On Wednesday the Sejm, the lower house of parliament, amended a government bill raising the limit of state budget spending on social housing, but Poland 2050, a junior partner in the centrist ruling coalition led by Tusk, tabled an amendment that the other governing parties did not want to approve.
The amendment, which makes it possible to become an owner of a rented social flat after 15 years, was passed with votes from Poland 2050 and the main opposition party, the socially-conservative Law and Justice (PiS), as well as the far-right Confederation.
"If it was yet another such moment of Poland 2050 underlining the distance to one's own coalition, I'd say it is unwise," Tusk said in Rome on Thursday.
Szymon Holownia, the leader of Poland 2050 and the Sejm speaker, recently caused controversy in the ruling camp after he met with PiS politicians at night in a Warsaw apartment owned by a PiS MEP.
Later on Thursday, Tusk said that in the government reshuffle that would be announced later this month, he did not plan a deputy prime minister's position for Poland 2050.
"At the moment there's certainly no question about it," Tusk said. "I mean, as part of the government reshuffle I'm not planning a deputy prime minister's position for Poland 2050."
In the 2023 parliamentary election in which a coalition of pro-European parties led by Tusk ousted PiS after eight years in power, the centre-right Poland 2050 campaigned under a single banner of The Third Way with the agrarian Polish People's Party (PSL). But after the first round of the presidential election of May 18 that proved disastrous for Holownia, who got a mere 4.99 percent of the vote, Poland 2050 and PSL decided to part ways.
In the current government, the already broken up Third Way has one deputy prime minister, Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, who is also the PSL leader. (PAP) jd/mf
