WARSAW (Reuter) - Pressure grew on Tuesday on Solidarity leader Marian Krzaklewski to agree to become Poland's next prime minister after his AWS alliance of right-wing parties swept to victory in parliamentary elections on Sunday. Krzaklewski, who seems reluctant to take the job, emerged nevertheless as the most viable candidate after Solidarity's potential partner in a future coalition endorsed him. "If the AWS puts forward Marian Krzaklewski, we will accept this, otherwise we will insist that (our leader) Leszek Balcerowicz should become prime minister," Bronislaw Geremek, a leader of the smaller Freedom Union (UW) party, told the daily Gazeta Wyborcza.

Krzaklewski's AWS (Solidarity Election Action) has ruled out agreeing to Balcerowicz, author of Poland's market reforms in the early 1990s. The UW came third in the election with 14 percent of the vote behind the AWS with 34 percent and the ruling former communists with 27 percent, preliminary unofficial returns show. President Aleksander Kwasniewski, who let it be known earlier that he would prefer Balcerowicz, signalled in a newspaper interview that Krzaklewski should not be ruled out. Ex-communist Kwasniewski, who faces an uneasy cohabitation with the AWS, has to nominate the prime minister and empower him or her to form the government.