REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, WARSAW - Poland's prime minister designate, Ewa Kopacz, brought party rival Grzegorz Schetyna into her new government as foreign minister on Friday to try to neutralize a potential challenge to her authority.

Outgoing foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski, one of Poland's most high-profile politicians on the international stage, is to be given the job of speaker of parliament, on paper the second most senior role in the state after the president.

Kopacz, announcing her new cabinet line-up at a ceremony at Warsaw's University of Technology, left the other big ministerial posts -- finance, defense, and treasury -- unchanged. 

She said her selections were intended to ensure continuity of the policies started by outgoing Prime Minister Donald Tusk, her mentor who is leaving for a senior post in Brussels, and to preserve unity in the ruling Civic Platform party.

"I wanted a strong government with the backing from the whole of Civic Platform," said Kopacz, who will become Poland's second woman prime minister when she is confirmed in the post.

"We have elections next year, and as they say, it's all hands on deck. That's why Grzegorz Schetyna is in the government."

Kopacz, until now speaker of parliament, was hand-picked by Tusk to take over from him after he was appointed President of the European Council, responsible for chairing European Union summits.

Kopacz will be formally appointed as prime minister by the president on Sept. 22. Under the constitution, she then has two weeks to submit her government to a vote of confidence in parliament, where the ruling coalition has a small but usually reliable majority.

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