Poland Sees 180º Political Turn After Elections

The Law and Justice party of Poland (PiS) won the Oct. 26 parliamentary elections. The conservative party gained 235 seats in the Sejm, the lower house, and 61 seats in the Senate of the Polish Parliament. Combined with the successful surprise election of the party’s Presidential candidate, Andrzej Duda, the PiS secured control of Polish politics and the downfall of the centrist party Civic Platform (PO). Andrzej Duda, Current President of Poland Source: Wikimedia Commons

The results ended the coalition government between Civic Platform and the Polish People’s Party, which had governed since 2007. It is also the biggest victory by a single party since the country’s first free elections in 1989.

With a voter turnout of 51 percent, PiS secured 37.6 percent of the vote. They were followed by Civic Platform (24.1 percent), the anti-establishment KUKIZ’15 (8.1 percent), the party only named as Modern (7.6 percent), and the Polish People’s Party (5.1 percent).

The leader of PiS is Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the brother of the former President Lech Kaczynski who died in the Smolensk plane accident in 2010. The party was formed by the brothers in 2001 after they split from Solidarity Electoral Action, the direct successor of the Solidarity movement that propelled free elections Communist Poland.

The PiS is widely seen as “Catholic, conservative, and Eurosceptic.” Euronews reported that this swing to the right “risks putting the country on a collision course with its key EU allies.”

The particular issue that the new government has sought to address is the relocation of migrants. In the wake of the Paris attacks on the Nov. 13, the designated Minister for European Affairs, Konrad Szymanski, commented on the migrant quotas in Europe, stating, “we do not see the political possibilities to implement [the relocation].”

This was immediately rebuked by former Polish President and founder of Solidarity Lech Walesa, who said that until the conflict in the Middle East has ended, “we need to help them survive and be sheltered in our country”.

During this same speech, Walesa also warned the newly empowered right-wing parties, “If they are going to do things for the advantage of Poland I will support them, and if they do anything against that, I will prevent them from destroying the freedom that we fought for.”

This is in the face of a Polish political scene that has no left-wing political parties or groups in the Parliament. The United Left, led by Barbara Nowacka, combined the socialist, social democratic, and green parties, but failed to make the 8 percent threshold required for coalitions to enter parliament. As a result, the  weakened Civic Platform is now a large part of the opposition force.

Despite the PiS’s large victory, KUKIZ’15 and Modern also emerged as winners. The parties were not previously in the parliament, yet with a combined total of 70 seats in the Sejm, they earned 3rd and 4th place respectively. These parties reflect the movement of the Polish youth to the right.

Modern, in particular, was first seen as a party that could do well against Civic Platform in the October elections. Led by economist Ryszard Petru, it emphasizes pro-European economic policies. KUKIZ’15, on the other hand, was founded to support the Presidential campaign of Polish rock star Pawel Kukiz. The party is an anti-party with appeals to the far-right, a movement that is gaining major traction amongst Polish youth. On Poland’s Independence day, 25,000 demonstrators   marched under anti-EU slogans such as “Yesterday it was Moscow, today its Brussels which takes away our Freedom.”

Poland’s election have turned a country, which had previously been a bastion of pro-EU sentiment in Eastern Europe, to a place where the Left will struggle to make its voice heard in the corridors of power amongst the new wave of elected right-wing parliamentarians.