In Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk seems to be getting more and more fed up of having to cohabit with President Lech Kaczyński. He is half-way through the legislative term and, yesterday, he proposed a series of reforms that would weaken the presidency, including election by the legislature.

There is a report in Polish here. There are also some details on the Warsaw Voice website. According to this report, Prime Minister Tusk proposes depriving the president of veto powers, and changing the presidential election process from a popular vote to a vote of the joint chambers of the Parliament. He proposed that the changes be introduced in time for the next presidential election, which is scheduled in October last year.

I am told by a Polish expert that proposals for reform of this general nature are relatively common and that they tend to die when they go to the legislature. Prime Minister Tusk has presidential ambitions, which perhaps makes the proposal more credible that usual, though if he knows that the reform is unlikely to be passed in parliament, then he can get credit for the idea and blame Kaczyński’s PiS (Law and Justice party) if they block the idea there.

Meanwhile in an opinion poll earlier this month from CBOS, Tusk’s Civic Platform party scored 38% (down three), while the PiS scored 18% (up one). The left-wing SLD was up slightly to 9% and the coalition partner PSL (Peasant Party) was at 5%, just above the threshold for representation in parliament.