WARSAW: Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz has led Poland with energy and drive since last year, but the trained physician has failed to find a miracle cure for her stagnant ruling Civic Platform (PO).
Polls show the liberal party losing Sunday's general election to the conservative Catholic opposition by a wide margin.
An ex-parliament speaker, the elegant 58-year-old took over the leadership of the PO-led centre-right government when her predecessor Donald Tusk became EU president.
Known for her unwavering loyalty to Tusk, Kopacz's task was twofold: ensure the reelection of then president Bronislaw Komorowski and keep her party in power for a third consecutive term.
She had no luck on the first front, with Andrzej Duda from the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) opposition scoring a surprise victory in the May presidential vote.
Opinion polls suggest Sunday's parliamentary ballot is also a lost cause for the PO.
"Donald Tusk had a knack for being able to deftly lead the government and his party at the same time. Ewa Kopacz doesn't have the same gift," said political analyst Eryk Mistewicz.
"She failed to drum up enthusiasm, especially within her party. She lacked charisma and wasn't able to live up to the job," he told AFP.
Still, the former emergency room doctor managed to save her party from the spectacular downfall forecasted by several commentators.
"She rallied remarkably after (Komorowski's) defeat, which had threatened to sink her party just a few months before the general election, even if it was at the expense of a slight populist drift," said Stanislaw Mocek, a political scientist at the Polish Academy of Sciences.
An early-riser to the point of appearing tired at times, she crisscrossed the country by train to meet directly with voters.
She talked up the country's economic successes and tried to boost her party's image among Poles weary of seeing the centrists in power for eight years.
"I'm in the comfortable position of a person who delivered most of the goods promised a year ago," she said recently.
"I have the satisfaction and authority to tell voters that I accomplished what I promised and am proposing new solutions that I also intend to carry out."
- No poker face -
Born into a working-class family, Kopacz is the daughter of a seamstress and a locksmith.
"She's an uncompromising woman with character," says Janusz Palikot, a flamboyant former vodka baron turned MP.
But she has been reproached for wearing her heart on her sleeve and wavering on issues like the refugee crisis. Poland wound up agreeing to take in more than 7,000 migrants, going against the wishes of opposition parties and a good chunk of the public.
A member of Civic Platform since it was founded by Tusk in 2001, Kopacz became close to him when she helped care for his gravely ill mother and sister, according to local media.
"She's very determined about everything she does," says Jacek Zakowski, a leading political commentator in Warsaw.
In April 2010, after president Lech Kaczynski and dozens of senior officials were killed in a plane crash in Russia, then health minister Kopacz travelled to the crash site to personally oversee the identification of victims.
She later made waves by backing an abortion for a 14-year-old girl who had been raped.
Although Poland's abortion law -- one of the most restrictive in Europe -- allows for termination of a pregnancy in cases of rape and incest, or if the pregnancy poses a risk to the woman's life, the procedure is opposed by Poland's powerful Roman Catholic Church.
Kopacz is divorced with a daughter, also a physician, and a grandson.
AFP
