Polish centre-right parties clashed on Thursday at their first meeting to form a ruling coalition after winning Sunday's election, with signs a new government could be some weeks away.
The two-hour meeting between conservative Law and Justice and the smaller pro-business Civic Platform ended in acrimony over mostly procedural matters.
The coalition talks have been overshadowed by vying between the two parties' candidates in a presidential election on October 9 and a deal may be impossible until the presidential vote is over.
"Today we are no closer (to an agreement)," Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, the conservative nominee for prime minister, said. "What we're dealing with here is an election campaign."
The zloty eased but analysts said the market believed the two parties would eventually form a pro-reform government in Poland, the biggest new member of the European Union.
"There is only a slim chance that this government will not be formed," said Lukasz Tarnawa, an economist at PKO BP bank. "If we disregard the presidential campaign noise, there is no big risk."
The two parties scored a sweeping victory in the general election, defeating the ruling left with pledges to stamp out corruption and unblock stalled economic reforms.
But they differ over those reforms, with the conservatives promising to protect the bloated welfare state and their would-be partners wanting to curtail it.
That promise helped the conservatives come from behind to overtake the Civic Platform in the parliamentary election and they appear to be using the same strategy for their leader Lech Kaczynski in the race for president.
Surveys show Kaczynski is trailing the Civic Platform's moderate leader Donald Tusk by nine points.
Tusk and Kaczynski bowed out of the coalition talks on Thursday to try to keep their rivalry out of the negotiations.
Kaczynski has promised a clear break from what he calls the "Third Republic" - a term used to describe post-communist Poland which, he says, is plagued by corruption, cronyism and disregard for ordinary Poles.
Tusk's campaign portrays him as a common-sense moderate who stands a better chance to unite Poles and improve rocky relations with big neighbours Germany and Russia than Kaczynski, a tough-talking Warsaw mayor.
In a bid to change his image as a politician with little experience in foreign affairs, Kaczynski will visit Brussels on Friday -- a trip hastily organised when Polish media reported Tusk was going there to meet European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and leaders of the NATO alliance.
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