Polish PM Tusk seeks confidence vote over tapes scandal
WARSAW (Reuters) - Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Wednesday he would seek a confidence vote from parliament after secret recordings of senior officials plunged Poland into its worst political crisis for years.
"I'm ending my statement with a motion to the parliament speaker to conduct the confidence vote as soon as possible," Tusk told parliament, over a week after news magazine Wprost started publishing the tapes.
Tusk's ruling Civic Platform (PO) and its junior partner Poland's Peasants Party (PSL) hold the necessary majority to secure a confidence vote with 235 MPs - four above the required parliamentary threshold.
"There's no doubt that PSL MPs will stand shoulder to shoulder for stability," PSL head and Poland's deputy prime minister Janusz Piechocinski told Reuters.
The vote may take place later on Wednesday.
Tusk said earlier this week said he would not be forced by the illegal surveillance into changing his cabinet.
"There are two possibilities. One is election ... but between elections there's (the question of) a parliamentary majority," Tusk told MPs On Wednesday.
Dissolving parliament, the trigger for an early election, requires two-thirds of the votes in parliament, but no bloc controls that many seats.
"Starting tomorrow in Brussels I need to be certain that I'm holding a majority," Tusk said. "Without this mandate I will not be effective."
The Polish premier will go to Brussels to attend the first European Council meeting after European Union elections on Thursday and Friday. Poland hopes to secure more say in the new EU structures.
"CRIMINAL GROUP"
The secret recordings were made over several months at locations including high-end Warsaw restaurants.
In tapes made public so far, central bank governor Marek Belka and Interior Minister Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz were recorded discussing the removal of another minister and ways to put pressure on a private businessman.
Belka and Sienkiewicz have said their words were taken out of context and they deny doing anything illegal.
In another recording, Poland's Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski blasted the Polish-U.S. alliance and said British Prime Minister David Cameron's policy on Europe was either reckless or incompetent.
In his speech, Tusk reiterated that he believed a criminal group was behind the recordings, aiming to undermine Poland's position and influence its commodity and energy markets.
He linked the eavesdropping to Poland's role over neighbouring Ukraine, where it fiercely opposes Russian intervention, and to Warsaw's growing weight inside the EU.
"The background is wide and concerns several occurrences that you could observe recently," Tusk said. "They relate to people who acted in the sphere of gas links between Poland and Russia."
"There's an element concerning the coal trade from the east," he added. "The association seems obvious ... the situation in Ukraine and Europe is part of that."
Polish prosecutors said on Wednesday they had charged two people with illegally recording conversations and were questioning two more.
Analysts welcomed Tusk's comments on Wednesday.
"I think that the prime minister's decision is good, because the market was worried over the possibility of an early election," BZ WBK's senior economist Piotr Bielski said.
"If the prime minister gets a vote of confidence, all speculation will be stopped. Our assets, zloty and debt, would positively react."
(Writing by Adrian Krajewski; editing by Andrew Roche)