Centrist and left-wing parties in Poland, but also elsewhere in eastern and central Europe, should be concerned that people in so many areas voted for Law and Justice on Sunday.
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Poland held parliamentary elections on 25 October, with the conservative Law and Justice party defeating the incumbent Civic Platform government.
On the other hand, Law and Justice argues that the country should not adopt the euro until the Polish economy is more closely aligned with the rest of the European Union and that any final decision should be approved by a referendum. No matter that the economy stayed the EU’s consistently strongest; nor that Warsaw had built good ties with its neighbors or won a front-row seat at the power tables in Brussels.
If exit polls are confirmed, Sunday’s election was the first in Poland’s post-Communist history to give any party a majority in the 460-seat Sejm, the lower chamber of parliament.
Former prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who remains chairman of the party, loomed in the background, appearing only late in the campaign to make a heated speech attacking immigration and declaring that Muslims (who are few in Poland) bring “cholera on Greek islands, dysentery in Vienna, all sorts of parasites and bacteria that might be harmless to these people [but] might be risky here”.
But there is another Poland, too: a country where 10.6 percent of the population qualifies as working poor, one of the highest such rates in the EU.
This is especially the case in the moral-cultural sphere where it rejects what it sees as a hegemonic European Union liberal-left consensus that undermines Poland’s traditional values and national identity. However, he notes that divisions between Polish parties on global affairs are often an extension of domestic politics by other means and experience suggests that the new government may be more Eurosceptic in its rhetoric than in practice.
But Ms Kopacz did a bad job in selling her government’s record.
During the campaign, Law and Justice sharply criticized the outgoing pro-market government, accusing it of favouring big corporations and ignoring those Poles who have not thrived despite years of economic growth since the transition from communism to capitalism was launched 26 years ago. The average after-tax monthly salary is equivalent to only €700 (S$1,080), a third of the level in Germany.
Born in 1963 in Oswiecim, the site of the Nazi World War II concentration camp Auschwitz, Szydlo grew up near the mining town of Brzeszcze.
Kaczynski, a former prime minister, leads the party but has tapped Beata Szydlo, 52, to be the PiS’s choice for prime minister.
Mr Kaczynski frequently hinted at his belief that the culprits behind the plane crash were Russian intelligence agents, and has demanded a reopening of the inquiry into the disaster.
Mr Kaczynski is also likely to demand additional support from North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the US-led military alliance in Europe.
All in all, Poland’s winning Law and Justice party defy simple categorisations.
Now, I think, there should be a pivot of Law and Justice government, as well as experts on the Belarusian direction, who are abundant in this party, to a more active support of the democratic movement in Belarus. there are no doubts about that – it could be stated with certainity.
Poland’s largest coal miners Kompania Weglowa, KHW and JSW take part in a tender for the supplier of coal to one of energy units onwed by Czech utility CEZ, daily Dziennik Gazeta Prawna said.
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The new Polish government carries mixed news for Britain’s renegotiation bid, even if the party shares space with the Tories in the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) party group. However, it is, in rhetorical terms at least, a broadly anti-federalist (verging on Eurosceptic) grouping committed to opposing further European integration and defending Polish sovereignty. After years of facilitating political compromises, the Poles look set to join Europe’s awkward squad.
