Poland's government is set for more turmoil as Wprost magazine said it will publish secret recordings of officials, and the biggest opposition party called for Premier Donald Tusk to step down.
Transcripts and edited recordings of illegally taped conversations will be published in Wprost's Monday issue, Editor-in-Chief Sylwester Latkowski wrote on the website of the Warsaw-based magazine.
One recording is of Tusk's aide, Pawel Gras, talking with Jacek Krawiec, chief executive officer of the nation's biggest oil refiner PKN Orlen SA, Wprost reporter Michal Majewski wrote on his Twitter account.
Other officials on the tapes are Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, Treasury Minister Wlodzimierz Karpinski and former Finance Minister Jacek Rostowski, newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza reported, without saying where it got the information. Wprost publisher Michal Lisiecki didn't respond to two calls on his cellphone, while the magazine didn't answer calls to its main number.
"Early elections are definitely needed, but they need to be carried out by a technical government that can give some guarantee of honesty," Jaroslaw Kaczynski, head of the opposition Law & Justice Party, said Saturday in the northwestern port city of Szczecin.
On June 14, Wprost released recordings in which central bank Gov. Marek Belka discussed with Interior Minister Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz steps to boost the economy and help the government win elections next year. Belka has said the tape was "manipulated."
The release raised the possibility of a snap election and undermined the central bank's leadership. The junior party in the ruling two-way coalition piled pressure on Tusk, who said Thursday that the country may be forced to hold early elections.
A snap vote will be needed if more recordings emerge and other government members "are discredited," Janusz Piechocinski, head of the Polish Peasants Party, which governs with Tusk's Civic Platform, said in an interview with Gazeta Wyborcza.
Public prosecutors, who are independent from the government, ordered a raid on Wprost by the Internal Security Agency in search of evidence. Televised pictures of agents trying to pry a laptop loose from Latkowski led to accusations the government was trying to intimidate the media. Tusk told reporters Thursday that the incident was "unpleasant" and "costly to me."
The incursion into an editorial office should never have taken place and was a "disgrace," Deputy Justice Minister Michal Krolikowski said Friday at a news conference in Warsaw. Prosecutor General Andrzej Seremet said he'd be ready to step down if that would calm the situation.
Jacek Kondracki, the lawyer representing Wprost, handed over a pen drive with all recordings possessed by the magazine Saturday to prosecutors in Warsaw.
If Poland needs to hold a snap ballot, it may take place in a "few" weeks or months, Tusk said Thursday. His coalition controls 234 votes in the 460-seat lower house of parliament, 32 of which belong to the Piechocinski's party. A two-thirds majority, or 307 votes, is required for lawmakers to dissolve the legislature, making Civic Platform's support necessary to pass any such measure.
Two opposition parties, the Democratic Left Alliance and Janusz Palikot's Your Move, with 62 seats, say they'd support early elections but not the new "technical" government proposed by Law & Justice, which would require a simple majority of 231 votes to install. Law & Justice has 136 seats.
"Tusk is using early elections as a bogeyman to discipline his coalition partner and own backbenchers," Mariusz Blaszczak, head of Law & Justice's parliament caucus, said Thursday. "Our offer is on the table, and let's see who really is in the opposition."
Kaczynski's strategy may be to stay out of the government until next year and let the scandal weaken Tusk's party beyond repair, allowing Law & Justice to win 2015 elections on a scale matching Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's victory in 2010, said Radoslaw Markowski, a professor of political science at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.
"He may try to do the same as Orban, conducting more or less permanent agitation, in hopes of repeating Orban's success," Markowski said Saturday by phone. "A lot depends on the ruling coalition, and Tusk is making mistakes."
Information for this article was contributed by Konrad Krasuski, Maciej Martewicz and Piotr Skolimowski of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 06/22/2014