Poland’s center-right government has found its future called into question after leaked audio recordings suggested it cut a deal with the Polish central bank to boost the budget and garner political support.
The fallout led Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to raise the specter of snap elections as polls show plummeting support for his party, Civic Platform (PO), and increased backing for the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party.
Footage of government agents manhandling journalists from the Wprost weekly magazine, which leaked the secret audio recordings, has also raised alarm at home and abroad over press freedom.
The scandal “will fundamentally influence Polish politics, and the opposition will attempt to extract maximum benefit,” leading Warsaw analyst Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski told reporters.
The crisis erupted on Sunday last week with the release of the secret recordings, which were allegedly taken in a Warsaw restaurant in July last year.
They purportedly feature central bank chief Marek Belka telling Polish Minister of the Interior Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz that he would support the government’s economic policy if then-
Polish minister of finance Jacek Rostowski resigned.
Tusk has denied sending his minister to meet Belka, who in the recording says Rostowski’s “decommission” would be “essential” for the central bank to support government policy.
Rostowski was fired in November last year after six years on the job, but the central bank denied any deal was struck, saying Belka’s comments were taken out of context.
Analysts have dubbed the ensuing political fallout as the country’s worst since the two-term Tusk took office seven years ago. The next regularly scheduled elections are due next year.
Images of government agents attempting to wrestle a laptop out of the arms of Wprost’s editor-in-chief have sparked international ire.
“It’s the first time since 1989 [the end of communism in the country] that this has happened, and all journalists are against you, Mr prime minister,” top Polish journalist Monika Olejnik said at a press conference.
The Vienna-based Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) slammed the raid, saying it was “conducted without a previous court decision.”
“These kinds of investigation methods are unacceptable as they have a chilling effect on investigative journalism and could stifle media freedom,” OSCE media representative Dunja Mijatovic said in a statement on Thursday.
The famously unflappable Tusk has so far resisted calls for him to resign his position by PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
According to Warsaw political analyst Eryk Mistewicz, the leaks are a “velvety coup d’etat. They are “political blackmail aimed at ousting the prime minister.”
Opinion polls this week showed the PO down to 25 percent public support, with PiS climbing to 32 percent.
Rising voter dissatisfaction with Tusk became clear last month when PO won the EU parliament elections by less than a percentage point ahead of PiS.
The scandal comes as the ex-communist state — and current NATO and EU member — grapples with security concerns sparked by the escalating crisis in neighboring Ukraine.
Tusk has accused those behind the recordings of seeking to weaken Poland at this critical juncture by trying to topple his administration.
“Above all, we must find out who made the recordings and why,” Adam Szejnfeld, a close Tusk aide, said on Friday.
He suspects that either Polish or foreign intelligence agents taped the talks for financial or political gain.
“The last time that social pressure on politicians and the state was so strong was in the 1990s,” Mistewicz said, adding that he doubts the scandal would result in a snap election.
Polish media reports indicate that there are several hundred hours of recordings of politicians and top businessmen that could still be released.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS