Run-up to the presidential race; privatization makes progress, and the good and bad sides of immigration.
On Poland’s domestic political scene, RZECZPOSPOLITA says that the Speaker of Parliament Bronislaw Komorowski leads the race for the Polish presidency. The daily examines the results of public opinion polls according to which Komorowski would find it easier to defeat the incumbent president, Lech Kaczynski than the other candidate of the ruling Civic Platform, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski.
POLSKA writes that Komorowski has the backing of Civic Platform leaders at all levels but the outcome of the vote among 45, 000 rank-and-file party members is anyone’s guess.
On personnel matters, POLSKA has a front page story on former prime minister Jan Krzysztof Bielecki. His nomination as head of the newly-formed governmental Economic Council is described by the daily as Bielecki’s come-back to politics. In a few months’ time, he’s likely to become the Number Two in Prime Minister Tusk’s party and the government, the daily predicts.
Privatization is the top story in several papers, what with the sale by Poland’s Treasury of a 46.7 percent stake in the Bogdanka coal mine in Lublin, eastern Poland. The shares were sold to pension funds operating in Poland and also distributed among the almost 4, 000 employees of the mine. In its editorial, RZECZPOSPOLITA welcomes the government’s decision. ‘Bogdanka is the first genuinely-privatized mine in Poland. At a time when Silesian mining holdings register huge losses, Bogdanka is not begging for state assistance but is determined to fight for clients on its own. The future of Bogdanka will be a yardstick by which people’s views on privatization, mostly critical at the moment, will be shaped’, RZECZPOSPOLITA writes.
Under the headline, ‘The pound doesn’t attract Poles any longer’, DZIENNIK looks at the latest trends in immigration to the British Isles. Surveys show that 89 percent of Poles employed in the U.K. earn less than 400 pounds a week and that the average earnings of waiters, hotel staff and cleaners are only a fraction higher than the average wage in Poland. Despite this, Poles are not likely to return home in great numbers. DZIENNIK quotes an expert on immigration as saying that many Poles have found themselves in a trap: they have no courage to return with no savings and little prospect for a good job back in Poland.
But immigration can be a success story as well. RZECZPOSPOLITA has an interview with a girl from Poland who runs in local government elections in Jarfalla near Stockholm in September. Magda Lukaszewicz will be eighteen 11 days before the voting. She’s already been described by the Swedish press as the country’s youngest councilor. And GAZETA WYBORCZA interviews Adam Szeląg, a Polish gynecologist who was voted Sweden’s most popular doctor. ‘’When I arrived in Sweden 23 years ago I had an inferiority complex of someone from behind the Iron Curtain. I knew I had to be twice as good as my Swedish colleagues’, Adam Szeląg told GAZETA WYBORCZA. (mk)