KATOWICE: With his centrists poised to win Poland's Sunday election, incumbent Prime Minister Donald Tusk took the final stretch of his slick, Western-style campaign to the gritty south, wooing disgruntled small entrepreneurs and the jobless.
"You're the salt of the Earth," Tusk told a congress of small and medium enterprises (SME) Thursday in the Katowice coal basin.
Twenty-two years since communism's demise, small and medium size businesses form the backbone of Poland's free market economy, generating nearly half of the gross domestic product and 60 per cent of jobs.
Tusk's Civic Platform (PO) won the 2007 general election on promises of streamlining Poland's Byzantine bureaucracy and a tax system infamous for hampering both launching and running SMEs.
After four years, the PO has little to show for those promises with experts identifying Poland as one of the least hospitable climates for new business formation in Europe.
"I bow to your efforts which are not always adequately appreciated, also by politicians," he told the congress, eating humble pie, while outside bitter business owners angrily protested what they termed the Tusk government's "unfair" tax policy.
The incumbent prime minister, vying to be the first to win a second term since the advent of democracy in Poland in 1989, then drove his four-wheeled "Tuskobus" campaign to meet the jobless in the gritty, working-class neighbourhood of Giszowiec, long home to the region's coal miners.
Poland's jobless rate hit 11.7 percent in September and is expected to exceed 12.0 by the year's end.
Electrical cables dangle down from the ceiling in a freshly painted room in a century-old public bath where a dozen unemployed people have created the "Rybka" (Fish) cooperative, intent on creating jobs for themselves by transforming the venue into a neighbourhood eatery.
Tusk was treated to Rybka's house specialties as the co-operative gears up to open its doors to paying customers later this month.
"He had soup and pyzy slaskie -- a kind of gnocchi made with potatoes which is our regional dish -- and a meat roulade in sauce with red cabbage. And cake for dessert," Rybka cook Elzbieta Pniewska, 47, told AFP.
"He ate it all, he was really hungry," said the hairdresser who has failed to find work after recovering from a long illness.
"Employers want young people, not people my age," she says.
Running the kitchen at Rybka has become a real chance for her to return to a normal life.
"For the moment, we're volunteers and we're not earning anything but we'll open soon and I hope we'll start to earn something," she adds.
"We're doing everything ourselves and we're learning how," says Malgorzata Stankiewicz, a 41-year-old housewife who wants to get into the job market.
"We didn't talk politics with the prime minister, we talked about our project. Here in Giszowiec, coal miners have never really liked his liberals who aren't particularly worried about their fate," she observed.
"The prime minister could hardly believe we've done this all ourselves," says Eugeniusz Szymkowiak, 54, who spear-headed the Rybka co-operative with his wife and 28-year-old son.
We received 200,000 zloty (€45,000 $60,000) in financing and two-thirds of it came from EU funds. The city is renting us this building which is 280 square metres (3,000 square feet) for 700 zloty a month," he explains.
Massive cash injections stemming from Poland's 2004 EU entry have helped maintain and create jobs by buoying the GDP, and were a factor in making the country become the only EU state to avoid slipping into recession in 2009 when the last global crisis peaked.
The nation of 38 million absorbed a net 14 billion euros ($18.6 billion) in EU subsides between 2004-2009 and is allotted 68 billion euros for 2007-2013, a government report said.
Boasting central Europe's largest economy, Poland also expects to see output expand by 3.8 percent compared to the 1.6 percent average for the mostly richer 17-member eurozone, according to International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates.
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