A coalition of opposition parties won enough seats for the Law and Justice party (PiS) to lose power in the Polish parliamentary election this past October. The coalition has announced that it may choose to nullify arms deals worth 3 trillion won (US$2.28 billion) that Poland signed with South Korea.

In a local radio interview on Dec. 10, Szymon Hołownia, the speaker of Poland’s lower house, said that agreements signed by the interim PiS government “may be invalidated,” according to Reuters.

In a media interview on Saturday, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, who is expected to head the Ministry of National Defense in the upcoming administration, revealed that he will “analyze and evaluate” any defense contracts that were signed after the parliamentary election.

The opposition coalition, comprising the Civic Coalition, Third Way, and the Left, took more than half of parliamentary seats in the election on Oct. 15, and are expected to form a coalition government. Donald Tusk, the former president of the European Council, was elected to become Poland’s next prime minister on Monday.

The upcoming administration has announced its intentions to review multi-billion-dollar arms deals signed by the PiS, which during its lame duck period overspent from Poland’s public coffers on defense contracts without consulting with the incoming administration at a time when the country’s finances are already tight.

“After Oct. 15, PiS should have limited itself to administering the state and not spending public money,” Hołownia told a radio outlet, according to Reuters.

With little left in his term, Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Błaszczak remarked that the opposition coalition “will likely make the populist claim that they will replace Korean weapons with Polish arms, but they will end up achieving nothing.”

In a company bulletin on Dec. 4, Hanwha Aerospace announced that it had secured a second defense contract with the Polish Armaments Agency worth 3.45 trillion won (US$2.6 billion) for K9 self-propelled howitzers.

By Hong Seock-jae, staff reporter

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