For the first time since joining the EU, the Polish Left has collapsed, with Polish conservatives winning a sweeping victory in parliamentary elections yesterday. The former leading political party, the Democratic Left Alliance that descended from the former Communists that ran Poland during the Soviet era, dropped from 41% in the previous election to 11% yesterday, not even qualifying as the official opposition:

Voters in Poland's parliamentary elections shunned the nation's scandal-prone government of ex-communists to embrace two center-right parties that have promised tax cuts and clean government, partial results showed Monday.

The conservative Law and Justice Party had nearly 27 percent of vote in Sunday's parliamentary election with 60 percent of ballots counted. The free-market Civic Platform had 24.

The two parties, made up of former activists in the Solidarity movement, say they will form a coalition enabling them to claim more than 270 seats in parliament's 460-member lower house.

This comes as good news for the US, and bad news for the autocracy of Belarus. The new Polish government wants to implement free-market reforms that will address its crisis in unemployment, which sits at almost 18%, and will lower taxes in order to jump-start its economy. It will also purge old Soviet-era Communists from its government with the idea that people working from market-based principles will allow the government to work that much quicker to solve these problems.

The new regime also will likely strongly support the US on foreign policy. They have declared themselves open to negotiating an extension on the Polish commitment for their troops in Iraq, while the previous government had quietly informed us that they intended to leave in December when their initial agreement ended. They will also keep the pressure on in Belarus, pushing for democratization in what has been called Europe's last dictatorship.

One has to wonder what the EU will make of the new Polish government. They will have to deal with Warsaw's new commitment to tax cuts and free-market economics at a time when its central states (France and Germany) both turn away from such painful but necessary adjustments. While they may welcome Polish prosperity, the EU nations may have a lot of explaining to do if the Poles successfully transform their economy with their free-market approach. Brussels might have to take a hard look at whether the nanny-state can sustain itself for much longer, or whether Western Europe faces an economic calamity from the Ponzi schemes that comprise their social systems.

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» Poland vs. Germany 2005 from The Loudest Cricket
With elections in Poland and Germany sending those nations in opposite directions, it'll be interesting to see which nation will be able to turn around its dismal economy. Poles rejected the remnant communists in the Democratic Left Alliance and suppor... [Read More]

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