Businessweek: Urban Poles Spurn Politics for Business- by Jan Puhl
Urban Poles Spurn Politics for Business- by Jan Puh
Poland's city-dwellers are more interested in making money than politics and that could mean an upset for the Kaczynski twins in this weekend's elections. Chaos reigns in Warsaw politics, both domestically and abroad, and the new elections scheduled for this weekend are unlikely to lead to more stable conditions. Observers Thursday said the election race was still wide open. The latest opinion polls show the center-right opposition party Civic Platform is slightly ahead of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski's Law and Justice, although neither party seems likely to win an outright majority. Support for Civic Platform has surged in the last few days after its leader Donald Tusk defeated Kaczynski in a televised debate. Despite the political turmoil, the country is booming, with Gdansk only one of many examples of progress. The Polish economy will grow by more than 6 percent this year, and the unemployment rate in Poland has dropped from 19 to 12 percent since the country joined the EU.
The urban economies in the new Poland are doing especially well. Cities like Gdansk, Wroclaw and Poznan, governed by pragmatists who have carefully distanced themselves from the political wrangling in Warsaw, have almost no unemployment.
Labels: Donald Tusk, Elections, EU, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Poland
