Head of new Polish political force stresses strong economy

[pjotr]

Associated Press

Head of new Polish political force stresses strong economy

By MONIKA SCISLOWSKA

Jun. 26, 2015 10:10 AM EDT



WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The leader of Poland's new, pro-business political movement, .Nowoczesna (.Modern) said in June 2015 that a strong economy in Poland would breathe new energy into the European Union and help it compete on the global level.

Ryszard Petru spoke to The Associated Press after a news conference in which he sought online donations from supporters as a novel, transparent way of financing politics.



His movement, ModernPl Association, a liberal political party .Modern (.Nowoczesna). hoped it would gain between 12 and 20 percent of the votes in the general elections which took place in Poland in the fall. .Nowoczesna was initiated in May 2015 and seeks to free the economy from politics and is directed toward young, enterprising people, and an electorate usually associated with the ruling Civic Platform party (Polish: Platforma Obywatelska, PO), which, however, lost popularity after almost eight years in power.



Poland's political scene experianced a reshuffle, following the surprise win of conservative opposition candidate Andrzej Duda in May's presidential election. Duda's win was a warning to Civic Platform, which since June 2015 also faced competition from Petru's movement.

The Polish Parliamentary elections to both the Sejm and Senate on 25 October 2015 was won by the largest opposition party Law and Justice (PiS) with 37.6% of the vote against the governing Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska, PO), which achieved 24.1%. Beata Szydło succeeded Ewa Kopacz as Prime minister of Poland , and formed a one-party cabinet.

Petru, an economist with experience in the World Bank and in Poland's banks, also spoke in favor of a free trade agreement with the United States, the long-negotiated Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, saying that would help boost cooperation also in many other areas.

He also backs greater U.S. and NATO military presence in Poland and in the region, because "it is evident that NATO is more needed now than ever before." He did not refer directly to the armed conflict in neighboring Ukraine, that involves Russia-backed separatists.

Petru said he believes that Poland's wide participation in European markets would "inspire new energy and release competitiveness of the EU vis-a-vis the rest of the world."

.Modern (.Nowoczesna) today in februari 2016 is an opponent of the present PiS-Solidarna Polska government and has joined the Polish opposition movement Committee for the Defence of Democracy (Polish: Komitet Obrony Demokracji, KOD).




Ryszard Petru with the leader of the United Left of Poland, Barbara Nowacka


Kamila Gasiuk-Pihowicz (born 8 May 1983 in Warsaw) is a Polish lawyer and politician. She has been the spokesperson for the political party Modern since August 2015. In October 2015, she was elected to the Sejm, running from the first position on the party's election list in Warsaw II district and receiving 19,041 votes.

www.tvn24.pl/kropka-nad-i,3,m/barbara-nowacka-i-ryszard-petru-w-kropce-nad-i,585969.html

[pjotr]

Modern (Polish: Nowoczesna, styled as .Nowoczesna), is a liberal political party in Poland founded in late May 2015 by the economist Ryszard Petru.

The party received 7.6% of votes in the 2015 Polish parliamentary election, which resulted in winning 28 seats in Sejm (the Polish parliament). Paweł Kobyliński, elected to the Sejm from Kukiz'15's electoral list moved to Modern's parliamentary group in December 2015, thus the party now has 29 seats.


Paweł Kobyliński, elected to the Sejm from Kukiz'15's electoral list moved to Modern's parliamentary group in December 2015

Formation

The movement was founded in late May 2015 as NowoczesnaPL (ModernPL) by economist Ryszard Petru. Due to some controversy over its name – there had already been a non-governmental organization called Fundacja Nowoczesna Polska (Modern Poland Foundation) – in August 2015, the movement's name was changed to .Modern (.Nowoczesna). Around the same time, the party's new logo was presented, and Kamila Gasiuk-Pihowicz became its spokesperson.


Kamila Gasiuk-Pihowic, .Nowoczesna's spokesperson



Source: Wikipedia

[pjotr]

Ryszard Petru



Ryszard Jerzy Petru (born July 6, 1972, Wroclaw, Poland) is a Polish economist and politician. He served as an assistant to several members of parliament in the 1990s. He has worked as an economist for the World Bank, PricewaterhouseCoopers and several Polish banks. Since 2011, he has been the chairman of the Association of Polish Economists. He is the author of several books, including two children's books on economics.

In 2015, Petru founded a liberal political party .Modern (.Nowoczesna). The party received 7.6% of votes in the 2015 Polish parliamentary election. Petru was elected to the Sejm from Warsaw (19) district.



Career

Education and early career (1990s–2001)

Ryszard Petru studied at the Faculty of Computer Science and Management of the Wrocław University of Technology, and graduated from the Warsaw School of Economics. During the second year of his studies at the WSE, he became an assistant of the Democratic Union MP Władysław Frasyniuk. On the recommendation of his lecturer Leszek Balcerowicz, Petru began working for the Center for Social and Economic Research. In 1995, he became Balcerowicz's assistant.


Ryszard Petru's lecturer Leszek Balcerowicz


Władysław Frasyniuk, Leszek Balcerowicz and Ryszard Petru

Between 1997 and 2000, when Leszek Balcerowicz was the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance, Petru served as his advisor, working as a consultant in the office of the Government Plenipotentiary for the Pension System Reform. In 1998, he started working as a teacher at the Warsaw School of Economics. He was a member of the Freedom Union at that time, being one of their candidates in the 2001 Polish parliamentary election, earning 4646 votes in the Warsaw suburbs district.



Banking and corporate career (2001–2014)

From 2001 to 2004, Petru worked as an economist for the Polish and Hungarian affairs at the World Bank,[6] dealing with the reform of public finances, regional policy and investment climate. Then, until 2008, he held a position of the chief economist at the Bank BPH. He then worked at the BRE Bank (later rebranded to mBank) as the director for the bank's strategy and chief economist, and as a managing director at PKO BP. Between 2011 and 2014, he was a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, responsible for the area of Polish small and medium-size private companies.



Since May 13, 2011 he has been the Chairman of the non-profit organization Association of Polish Economists. He also occasionally cooperated with Forum Obywatelskiego Rozwoju (Civil Development Forum), founded by Leszek Balcerowicz, as a speaker at their meetings and seminars.

In 2013, he appeared as an expert in seven episodes of a Religia.tv show Morality and Ethics in the Time of Crisis, where current events from the world of finance and economics were discussed. In the same year, he became an economic advisor to the Marshal of the Lower Silesian Voivodeship.

Between 2008 and 2013, Ryszard Petru was an informal advisor to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, acting as the intermediary between Tusk and the International Monetary Fund. A document signed and sent from the United States Embassy in Warsaw by (now former) U.S. Ambassador Victor Ashe, detailing his meeting with Petru, was published by WikiLeaks in March 2009.



From February to March 2014, Petru was the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Polish State Railways. In the same year, he became the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Solaris Bus & Coach enterprise.

He has been an author of publications on economics, including the book The end of the free market? The origins of the crisis (2014), written with journalist Łukasz Lipiński. He worked as an expert and co-author with Grzegorz Kasdepke on two children's books explaining the ins and outs of economics, published by the National Centre of Culture.

Naucz swoje dziecko ekonomii

Political career with Modern (2015–present)

In May 2015, Petru created the 'Modern PL' ('NowoczesnaPL') foundation in Rzeszów, and then the association with the same name, and declared forming a political movement around them. Among people involved in that process were: an activist and former businessman Wadim Tyszkiewicz (Mayor of Nowa Sól), and Paweł Rabiej.

In August 2015, the movement's name was changed to .Modern (.Nowoczesna). The party represents a liberal ideology. As the leader of the party, Petru severely criticized the Civic Platform government and the Law and Justice party, labelling them as untrustworty and unreliable.

In October 2015, Modern received 7.6% of votes in the Polish parliamentary election. Running from the first position on the party's election list in Warsaw, Petru was elected to Sejm, receiving the third best result in the country (129,088 votes), behind Ewa Kopacz (230,894 votes) and Jarosław Kaczyński (202,424 votes).

Private life

Since 1997, he has been married to Małgorzata. They have two daughters.

Controversy

As a teenager, Petru had lived in the Soviet Union for two years. He resided in Dubna, Moscow Oblast, where his father and mother worked for the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR, Russian: Объединённый институт ядерных исследований, ОИЯИ). The fact that the Institute was controlled by the GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye), the main military foreign-intelligence service of the Soviet Union, has caused controversy in Poland decades later.

Source: Wikipedia

[Bonobo]

Feb 6, 2016 2:01:21 GMT 1 pjotr said:

Controversy

As a teenager, Petru had lived in the Soviet Union for two years. He resided in Dubna, Moscow Oblast, where his father and mother worked for the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR, Russian: Объединённый институт ядерных исследований, ОИЯИ). The fact that the Institute was controlled by the GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye), the main military foreign-intelligence service of the Soviet Union, has caused controversy in Poland decades later.

Source: Wikipedia

Some right wing media already accused him of being brought up under the surveillance of GRU, Soviet intelligence. As a 12-year-old boy.

link

[Polishprideson]

Why are you raving so miuch about that loser Petru and his company of banksters who played a few tricks and earned millions from diverse dirty machinations?  Yes, they have enough dough to buy a few Polish voters but most Poles will never fall for their lies. They must not be trusted, voting them is a disgrace and patriots of Poland should remember about it for ever.