Sex-for-jobs scandal threatens Polish coalition

POLAND: After promising Poland a moral revolution, leading members of Warsaw's coalition government stand accused of demanding…

POLAND: After promising Poland a moral revolution, leading members of Warsaw's coalition government stand accused of demanding sexual favours from party employees in exchange for work.

At the centre of the sex scandal is deputy prime minister and agriculture minister Andrzej Lepper, the fiery head of the populist Self Defence party.

A former county councillor from the party, identified only as Aneta K, told a newspaper that in 2001, as an unemployed single mother of two, she was brought by Self Defence MP Stanislaw Lyzwinski to meet Mr Lepper in a Warsaw hotel room.

"I knew it wasn't a sightseeing trip," she told Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, adding that Mr Lepper told her that she would have to sleep with him to get a job.

READ MORE

"He told me to go and take a shower. I was sitting there for half an hour thinking what I should do. I didn't wash and came back to the room. Then intercourse happened."

Ms K also alleges she was forced into having sex with Mr Lyzwinski.

"When I said no threatened me, saying that there are hundreds of other girls waiting for this post," she told the newspaper.

The following year, she became a councillor for the party in the city of Lodz and was forced to have sex regularly with Mr Lyzwinski until she lost her seat in last month's local elections.

"I know it will seem like revenge, but I have to get it out. I told myself: 'Thousands of women do so, I'll do this once and erase this from my memory.' But I can't."

Mr Lepper has denied the allegations and has said he will sue Gazeta Wyborcza and the woman. "What kind of authority is she? She has had three children, each with a different man," he said. After that remark, Ms K claimed that the father of her third child was Mr Lyzwinski and demanded that he pay child support.

Already, three other party officials have come forward telling similar "job for sex" stories involving Mr Lyzwinski.

It's not the first time that Self Defence has been involved in a sex scandal. When a party MEP was accused of raping a prostitute, Mr Lepper asked: "How can someone rape a prostitute?"

Prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski is coming under growing pressure to fire Mr Lepper, bringing down his government coalition after just seven months in office.

There is no love lost between the two men: when Mr Lepper walked out of office in September, Mr Kaczynski promised he would never work with such "people of poor repute" ever again. But Mr Kaczynski needs Self Defence votes in parliament and was forced to take Mr Lepper back on board.

Meanwhile Mr Kaczynski's other coalition partner, the conservative ultra-Catholic League of Polish Families (LPR), is dealing with its own scandal.

A Polish television station showed members of LPR's youth group at a neo-Nazi rock festival, giving the Hitler salute to a huge swastika and a photo of a prominent LPR politician.