Poland: Poland could avoid early elections after the left-wing populist Andzrej Lepper entered fresh negotiations with the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party three weeks after he was sacked as deputy prime minister.
Yesterday it emerged that Mr Lepper, head of the Self Defence farmers' party, has held talks with Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and may reach a deal by early next week to avoid a new general election just a year after the last.
But senior PiS officials warned the talks could stumble over Mr Lepper's insistence on returning to the cabinet as agriculture minister and his demand for greater budget spending for farmers and social welfare recipients.
The Self Defence leader was sacked last month after threatening to block the budget unless his spending demands were met.
The departure of Mr Lepper and his Self Defence MPs left Mr Kaczynski without a parliamentary majority.
His party officials began trying to get Lepper MPs to defect to PiS and one such solicitation, by a leading aide to the prime minister, was secretly filmed and broadcast on a popular news channel.
An outraged Mr Lepper demanded that President Lech Kaczynski - twin brother of the prime minister - sack the government and call fresh elections.
That hasn't happened and instead several deadlines for PiS to find a new parliamentary majority have passed, prompting opposition parties to increase the pressure.
Last weekend more than 11,000 supporters of the opposition Civic Platform (PO) marched through Warsaw, calling for fresh elections and blaming the brothers for paralysing domestic politics and straining Poland's diplomatic relations with its EU neighbours.
Around 6,000 PiS supporters organised a simultaneous counter-demonstration.
Mr Kaczynski won last year's election by promising to dismantle what he terms the uklad, a shadowy network of businessmen, former secret police officers and ex-communists who he claims, dominate Polish life.
Since then, however, his government has lurched from one political crisis to another.
After failed coalition talks last year, PiS formed a minority administration followed by a three-way coalition with Self Defence and the ultra-Catholic and anti-Semitic League of Polish Families that collapsed after four months.
Mr Kaczynski is anxious to avoid elections as polls show his party has slipped into second place behind the PO.
Almost 40 per cent of Poles support the idea of early elections, according to a recent poll, while only one in five is in favour of giving the governing coalition a further lease of life in some new guise.
