Interesting times in Poland...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Following the resignation of Prime Minister Marcinkiewicz, Kaczynski has appointed his brother as P.M (meaning that Poland is the only country in the world with identical twins as President and P.M)... and there are reports that three opposition parties are going to form an a sort of anti-Kaczynski alliance.
Don't know which parties these are, although by the sound of it one is SLD.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There are rumours that early elections are possible

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Prime Minister Kaczynski has fired Lepper, meaning that the coalition is over. Unless Kaczynski can cobble together a new coalition in the next few days, fresh elections this autumn seem likely.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Seeing as one of the main reasons why they managed to lose to PiS last time was their flat tax proposals...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

...and now PiS is embroiled in an unpleasent little corruption scandal (a senior aide to the PM was filmed bribing an M.P to switch parties).

As a result of that scandal, PSL has said it won't go into coalition with PiS.

Fresh elections are almost certain now.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Does the Polish Peasant's Party have any other parties remotely like it in Europe?

There are quite a lot of Agrarian parties in Europe, especially in the East and in Scandinavia.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

The big European Socialist/Social Democratic parties date from a time before modern social issues were of any real importance; they were in the '60's (and still are now) mainly parties of what would be called economic issues in the U.S. The New Left was something that, mainly, happend outside these parties (and outside the two big Communist parties (PCI, PCF) as well) rather than inside them (as was the case in the U.S), at least initially.
Or to put it another way: there's no contradiction between being leftwing and not being socially liberal* because there was no link between these two concepts in the first place.

*A sizeable proportion of the hard-left Campaign Group over here are social conservatives.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

First round of local elections the other day; general pattern seems to be as expected (ie; PO do well, PiS do badly).

In Warsaw, Marcinkiewicz seems to be in trouble... he only polled about 2pts more than the PO candidate (38% to 36%), while most of the remaining votes went to Marek Borowski (who polled 20%).
Interestingly enough, Marcinkiewicz ran about 8pts ahead of what the PiS got for the city council elections. Borowski also ran a bit ahead of the united leftish list.

League of Polish Families did badly everywhere, btw.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Just to say, but there's a bizarre sex-scandal going on involving Lepper