October 23, 2007	Tuesday	Shawwal 10, 1428

WARSAW: Poland’s victorious pro-business party, which swept the ruling conservatives from office in a snap election, has promised to withdraw Polish troops from Iraq and heal rifts with fellow EU members.

The pro-European, economically liberal and socially conservative Civic Platform (PO) is likely to ruffle feathers in Washington because of his manifesto pledge to bring home the 900 Polish soldiers serving in Iraq.

“Poland’s foreign policy is going to change significantly,” said Pawel Swieboda, a former foreign ministry official who now heads a Warsaw think-tank.

“PO will reinforce its European plank and won’t take American proposals as they come.” PO leader Donald Tusk’s Iraq promise is highly popular in Poland, where opinion polls show more than 80 per cent oppose the mission.

Warsaw has been one of the closest US allies over Iraq, with Polish troops taking part in the 2003 invasion.

US-Polish ties strengthened after the election in 2005 of the Law and Justice (PiS) party of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his twin, President Lech Kaczynski.

Last December, the president extended the Iraq deployment until the end of this year, and the PiS government had said it was planning to send a new group of soldiers in 2008.

Twenty-one Polish soldiers have been killed in Iraq since 2003. And this month Poland’s ambassador Edward Pietrzyk narrowly escaped a roadside bombing that killed his bodyguard-driver.

PO’s ratings jumped after Tusk challenged Jaroslaw Kaczynski in a televised debate, asking the premier: “What gives you the right, you and your brother, to extend the mission in Iraq ... to put the lives of Polish soldiers at risk?” Kaczynski defended Poland’s close ties to Washington and said Poles “have never been deserters or cowards.” Poland “needs the alliance” with the United States, “the only country able to come to our aid in the difficult situations there have been in history,” he said.

Tusk has also signalled a tougher approach in talks on siting a battery of missiles in Poland as part of a planned US defence shield.

The anti-missile shield plan has raised hackles in Russia and disquiet among many of Poland’s NATO partners.

Tusk also accused the Kaczynskis of failing to drive a hard bargain in the shield talks, pointing to a failure to win looser US visa restrictions for Poles.

Radoslaw Sikorski, an Atlanticist who is tipped to become Tusk’s defence minister — a job he held under Kaczynski until he quit this year — said the ball was in Washington’s court.

“We’re the ones taking the risk on the shield,” he said.

“Sympathy among Poles for the United States has fallen from 60 per cent to 38 per cent. Unless the American government does something spectacular, public opinion will not forgive the next ‘gift’”.

Warsaw will also rethink the role of its 1,200 troops in a Nato-led security force in Afghanistan, senior PO official Bogdan Zdrojewski said.

“The Polish mission in Afghanistan must change character. Poland has been overzealous there,” he said.

Tusk has also said he will seek improved ties with Russia and halt the sparring with fellow EU member states in the bloc’s reform process.

“The new government will bring Poland back into the European political mainstream,” said Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, president of the European Parliament’s foreign policy committee and PO’s main spokesman on EU issues.

“The politics of the past two years have caused conflict without bringing a single positive result, and have damaged Poland’s image. We are going to change that.”

Already on Sunday, Saryusz-Wolski had told AFP that the new government would adopt the EU charter of fundamental rights, which the conservatives bitterly opposed.

At an EU summit in Lisbon last week, the Polish delegation led by Lech Kaczynski rejected the charter, notably its liberal stand on gay rights, although he did accept its provisions on trade unions.—AFP