• Shipyard debate or electoral campaign?
  • 19.05.2009

Opposition MP Jacek Kurski says yesterday’s TV debate between PM Donald Tusk and shipyard trade unionists was merely an attempt to distract the general public from the government’s incompetence.

 

“It was just a government PR stunt,” says Kurski for the Law and Justice (PiS) party. In his opinion the real aim of the debate was to divert the public’s  attention from an “incompetent cabinet policy” towards the shipyards.

 

The government proposed the debate in response to a fierce trade union protest in Warsaw last month  - where some unionists and police were injured in violent clashes - and the announcement that trade unionists would disrupt celebrations of the end of communism 20 years ago in Gdansk.

 

Grzegorz Dolniak from Civic Platform (PO), the senior coalition partner, said that two of the largest trade unions quit  the debate before it began because they were afraid that the PM would reveal the weakness of their arguments. “If someone has chickened out then definitely it was not the Prime Minister,” Dolniak declared.

 

The trade unionists, however, say that they did not want to appear with all the different trade union groupings at the Gdansk shipyard – who together represent around 10 percent of the workforce – and should have focused on the two main unions, Solidarity and the All Poland Trade Union Agreement (OPZZ).

 

Politicians from the junior coalition partner, the Polish Peasant Party (PSL) had a similar impression. MP Stanislaw Zelichowski thought that the trade unionists had knew that their stances would “crush like a soap bubble”, confronted with the PM Tusk’s arguments.

 

The left wing opposition did not want to asses whose arguments were stronger. But the Left Democratic Alliance’s leader, Grzegorz Napieralski criticized the idea of the meeting itself.

 

“We all know what was its goal: the debate was to win some additional percentage points at a time of the electoral campaign a[for the European Parliament] and later announce a great victory for PM Tusk,” Napieralski claimed.

 

President Lech Kaczynski, who is currently on an official visit to Italy, refused to comment on the debate issue. He just said, that the shipyard’s problems should not be solved via TV debates. (jg/pg)

 

Source: IAR