Chain-smoking doctor seeks to rally Poles with new cabinet

Until recently, Ewa Kopacz kept a stethoscope in her handbag in case help was required. As Poland's new prime minister, she'll need her skills to heal the ruling party and win over voters before next year's election.

The chain-smoking doctor and parliament speaker takes over from Donald Tusk, who will become European Union president and was Poland's longest-serving prime minister since the 1989 fall of communism. She named a new cabinet today that included Tusk rival Grzegorz Schetyna as foreign minister.

Her Civic Platform party is vying with the opposition in opinion polls, economic growth is sputtering and the situation in neighboring Ukraine remains tense. Her patron's exit also means Kopacz must deal with factions within the party. Schetyna himself said earlier this week that Civic Platform should vote on a new leader after next year's general election.

"Her main task will be to consolidate the party and deal with difficult situations abroad," said Bartlomiej Biskup, a political scientist at Warsaw University. "Tusk is putting her in a tight spot as she has elections to win, leaving her with precious little time to leave her own mark on policy."

Kopacz, 57, came to politics after 20 years as a pediatrician and court-appointed doctor in Szydlowiec, a small town 130 kilometers (81 miles) south of Warsaw that has the country's highest municipal unemployment rate. Born to a seamstress and a mechanic, she ran a parliamentary campaign for her husband in 1997, seeking support among medical staff and tapping family savings to print leaflets.

Parliament Speaker

While he failed to secure the seat, she ran and won four years later. The couple divorced in 2008 and her husband died of natural causes last year.

Kopacz rose through party ranks to become health minister in 2007 and parliament speaker in 2011. While she formally ended her medical career as head of the Szydlowiec clinic in 2001, Kopacz is remembered by her colleagues in parliament for giving advice and writing prescriptions.

She was also reported to have helped Tusk when he tore a ligament in his knee playing soccer, his favorite sport, according to a 2009 article in Polityka magazine.

"At heart, she's remained a doctor," Krystyna Skowronska, a Civic Platform lawmaker who has known Kopacz since their first parliamentary term, said by phone from Gdansk. "She'd always been there for her colleagues to help with ailments and injuries." Thus the stethoscope in the purse, Skowronska said.

Kopacz also won the future prime minister's trust when she helped seek treatment for his sister following a stroke. She crisscrossed the country to look for specialists and assisted with her treatment in a clinic in Berlin, according to an account in Dziennik newspaper.

"Such a life-and-death experience brings people together" and gave Kopacz more leeway with Tusk, Janusz Palikot, former Civic Platform politician and leader of Your Movement party, wrote in his book "Backstage at Civic Platform." "At the same time, she's been incredibly loyal to the prime minister."

As for her own health, Kopacz has had little success in ending her cigarette habit, despite public promises to do so. In a taped segment with TVN TV, she decried a 2010 law restricting smoking as "an attack on my personal freedom" and said it would keep her from smoking in cafes or in her car.

Iwona Sulik, Kopacz's spokeswoman, didn't respond to phone calls and text messages requesting comment.

Before becoming premier, her biggest challenge came in April 2010, after a presidential plane carrying top government officials crashed outside Smolensk, Russia. President Lech Kaczynski and central bank Governor Slawomir Skrzypek were among the 96 people killed. Kopacz volunteered to fly to Moscow to help families identify the bodies because, she later said in an interview with Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, her experience as a court-appointed doctor in Szydlowiec had prepared her.

"I saw a lot of mangled bodies," she told the newspaper in September 2010. "I drove to car and train crashes, to suicides and murders."

While two psychologists couldn't withstand the pressure and returned home, she stayed assisting the families, Kopacz told Gazeta Wyborcza. That earned her the nickname komandir, or commander, from the Russians who worked on the case.

Tatyana Golikova, who was her Russian counterpart, said "there was complete mutual understanding and willingness to cooperate" when they worked together.

Kopacz was "a professional: a balanced, tough, responsible person who got right to the essence of the problem," Golikova, who now heads Russia's Accounts Chamber, which audits public institutions, said in an e-mailed response to questions.

That hasn't stopped Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the opposition Law and Justice party and twin brother to Lech, from accusing Kopacz of mishandling the identification of bodies. While exhumations carried out by the military prosecutors in 2012 proved at least two bodies were misidentified, they blamed the Russian side for the mistakes.

Some of Kopacz's former colleagues and opposition politicians have also accused her of being chaotic and erratic. In his book, Palikot recalled how as health minister Kopacz would shout during meetings and "leave, slamming the door."

"She's incapable of acting independently and her only qualification appears to be enjoying Donald Tusk's trust," Jaroslaw Gowin, former Justice Minister and now the leader of the opposition Poland Together party, said by phone. "Poland deserves better."

Jakub Szulc, whom Kopacz brought to the health ministry to work on financial aid for hospitals, disagreed with the description of her as Tusk's hanger-on. He recalled that she stood her ground when Tusk sought to fire the minister's close associate, even threatening to step down.

"Ewa may not have Donald's panache," Szulc, who last month resigned as Civic Platform lawmaker to join the Ernst & Young LLP consulting firm, said by phone. "But anyone who thinks she doesn't have the skills or ability to make bold decisions is very wrong."

Even Szulc says it's hard to pin down the premier's economic views. Skowronska, who heads parliament's public finance committee, said Kopacz is "very sensitive to social problems," even with limited room to raise spending. The government has pledged to cut the budget deficit to less than 3 percent of economic output next year from 4.3 percent in 2013.

Yet coming in as Poland's second post-communist female prime minister, Kopacz has a chance to refresh the party image. She's been one of a handful of Civic Platform senior politicians who over seven years in power hasn't been ensnared in scandals that came close to capsizing the ruling coalition.

A mother of one, Kopacz said in a 2010 TV show that she liked to iron and wash to reduce stress. "Households where women are calling the shots are better for it," was her first comment after being designated prime minister by President Bronislaw Komorowski on Sept. 15.

"We were dealing with a bit of Tusk fatigue," Stanislaw Zelichowski, a lawmaker in the Polish Peasants Party, junior partner in the ruling coalition, said by phone. "Kopacz is decisive and well-organized. She has clear goals and this gives us a chance for a fresh start, a bounce-back in the polls and, eventually, victory in next year's elections."