On Poland's elections:

From the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Online (by subscription only, so here are excerpts):

It was billed Poland's most important election in 18 years, and it didn't disappoint. Sunday's poll won't have the impact of the historic June 1989 vote that brought on communism's death throes in Europe. But it should resonate outside Poland.

The election immediately ends, after two years, the strange double act atop Polish politics. A surprise Civic Platform victory pushed Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski out, though his identical twin, President Lech Kaczynski, stays on.

But Civic Platform's triumph heralds more than a change of personalities. Voters handed power to economic liberals in the Thatcher mold. They also dumped two extremist parties from Parliament, giving lie to the oft-heard trope that Eastern Europe suffers from some incurable populist bug. And, in the highest voter turnout since 1989, young people with hazy memories of communism made themselves heard for the first time, bringing a welcome generational shift.

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Poland transitioned to the current post-post-communist era in 2005, when the main ruling left-wing party tainted by corruption was rudely bounced out of power. Donald Tusk, the conciliatory leader of Civic Platform who barely lost the 2005 presidential election, comes from the same rightish political camp as Law and Justice. In Sunday's election, Civil Platform and Law and Justice won three in four votes.

As we wrote two years ago, Mr. Tusk and the Kaczynskis were poised to build the Polish version of the "Reagan coalition" with security hawks, patriots and ardent free marketeers all under the same roof. These parties had promised to form a governing coalition then but true to national character, squabbled and turned into adversaries, probably for good. The Kaczynskis went on to regret their coalition with the extremists.

Mr. Tusk now has another opportunity to realize a new political era. His party doesn't need to shy away from remembering the traumas of Poland's recent past. But his success will depend far more on reviving its role as a pacesetter for economic transformation. In the early 1990s, its "shock therapy" reforms showed the world the surest path from communism to free market. Civic Platform can make Poland a liberal laboratory. The party wants to reduce the deficit and cap spending to prepare Poland for tax cuts and the euro and to skinny down its burgeoning state. If Mr. Tusk manages to implement a flat tax on personal and corporate income by 2009 -- following the example of many of its neighbors -- Poland will be the largest EU country with one.
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...mark Sunday as another triumph of representative democracy in this region. Though sometimes rambunctious, Poland is a model of vitality for Western Europe's more stodgy political systems. And if Mr. Tusk plays his cards right, it could yet become an economic model, as well.

Poland elections Tusk Civic Platform