Electrician with 'big ear for the little man' set to win Polish vote

The first time Polish voters put their trust in an electrician, they elected Mr Lech Walesa president in the first free elections of 1989.

Tomorrow Poland will almost certainly elect as prime minister another electrician. However, Mr Leszek Miller is no mostachioed trade-union man, but a former member of Poland's last communist politburo.

With 52 per cent of popular support in opinion polls, the prospect of Poland's first single-party government since the communist era will be a "return to normality", according to the campaign slogan of Mr Miller's Democratic Left Union (SLD) at least. That's a welcome prospect for Polish voters anxious to banish into the political wilderness the conservative government who leave behind a legacy of rising unemployment, a stalling economy and a series of corruption scandals.

It was a different story four years ago when the revamped Solidarity joined forces with the Freedom Union and a score of right-wing parties to form the Electoral Action Solidarity (AWS).

They promised Poles a new type of government that would concentrate on reform of health care, pensions and education and get the country into the EU.

But the Prime Minister, Mr Jerzy Buzek, and the AWS alliance will be unceremoniously ousted from office tomorrow on a tide of economic gloom and corruption allegations that have overshadowed the government's achievements.

Most damaging has been the continuous departure of allegedly corrupt ministers. A high-profile crack-down on corruption started earlier this year was going well until the head of the investigation, the clean-cut Justice Minister, Mr Klech Kacznski, fell victim to corruption allegations and was sacked.

The telecommunications minister was fired after authorities found "irregularities" in tenders for third-generation mobile telephone licences. As election day approached, the ministerial sackings continued.

Public concern about corruption is reflected in a recent poll that found 93 per cent of Poles consider it as important an issue as unemployment, even though the jobless rate is running at almost 17 per cent with over 3 million out of work. "The central feature of high-level corruption appears to be close links between political and economic groups, between the public and private sector," the World Bank said in a report on Poland last year.

The conservative AWS suffered a fatal blow when leading lights of the alliance left to form a new centrist union, the Civic Platform. They have captured some 17 per cent of popular support and look set to be the second-largest political grouping, leaving many of the smaller conservative parties fighting for their political lives this weekend.

In contrast, the SLD leader, Mr Leszek Miller, has spent the last weeks on the campaign trail, greeted at each stop by supporters chanting the traditional song Stolat, "may he live 100 years".

As a member of Poland's last politburo, he sat across the negotiating table from Mr Lech Walesa and the Solidarity union 12 years ago. After the first free elections in 1989, Mr Miller repackaged himself as a social democrat and co-founded the SLD with the President, Mr Aleksander Kwasniewski, who defeated Mr Walesa in 1995.

In 1993, the SLD entered a coalition government and Mr Miller served as interior minister, but he was written off by one critic as an "ideological-free technocrat".

After the conservatives took office again in 1997, he disappeared for two years to reinvent himself again, even reportedly spending eight weeks in Ireland to learn English.

His well-trimmed silver hair and immaculate suits lend him the air of a US senator, something that has gone down well on the campaign trail, particularly with the female electorate.

He is so certain of electoral success tomorrow that he has already named key members of his cabinet. But beyond that, his future plans - and policies - remain vague. Education and unemployment formed the central pillars of the SLD's election campaign.

Other priorities, Mr Miller says, include getting Poland into the EU and combating corruption.

So far he has given little detail on how he plans to address these issues, or tackle Poland's most pressing economic problems: rising unemployment and a growing budget deficit that could reach $20 billion, or over 10 per cent of GDP, next year.

Rather than discuss policy at his election rallies, he shares the stage with a seven-year-old girl in an old-fashioned school uniform, who features in the SLD's billboard campaign.

"How will things be?" the little girl asks with a worried expression on her face as crowds look on. In his best fatherly voice, Mr Miller replies: "Everything will be fine". If you vote for the SLD, being the implication.

Opinion polls predict that 52 per cent of the Polish electorate is prepared to do just that tomorrow.

And next week, Mr Leszek Miller, dubbed by supporters "the man with the big ear for the little man", will become Poland's 10th democratically-elected prime minister in 12 years.