So far Ms Kopacz is doing well AS A chain-smoking doctor, Ewa Kopacz clearly has a certain appetite for personal risk. In her case, it also seems to exhaust any appetite for risk. But as she prepares to take over as prime minister of Poland, following Donald Tusk’s elevation to the presidency of the European Council, her central message is one of safety. Her main promise to voters is that she will not make any radical changes before next year’s parliamentary elections.In foreign policy that means dropping the confrontational approach to Russia favoured by Mr Tusk and Radek Sikorski, his foreign minister. In domestic policy Ms Kopacz promises more nursery schools, more old-people’s homes, help for students wanting to study abroad and measures to reduce youth unemployment.“I don’t suspect she has any vision,” says Jacek Zakowski, a Polish journalist. Ms Kopacz is a pragmatic centrist, he says, with perhaps a bit more of a natural sensitivity than Mr Tusk.Although she sets out to present a motherly public persona, Ms Kopacz occasionally displays flashes of Thatcherite steel. When she was health minister in 2009, she refused to be…
