“If Law and Justice end
up governing alone with an allied president, Poland will become
another Hungary,” said Prof Radosław Markowski of the Polish
Academy of Sciences, a reference to the extremist rightwing views of
the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
Poland
lurches to right with election of Law and Justice party
Exit
poll points to Beata Szydło becoming the country’s next prime
minister as ruling party concedes defeat
Alex Duval Smith in
Warsaw
Sunday 25 October
2015 21.01 GMT
Poland consolidated
its rightwing shift on Sunday as exit polls showed voters had handed
an absolute majority in its parliamentary election to Law and
Justice, a Eurosceptic party that is against immigration, wants
family-focused welfare spending and has threatened to ban abortion
and in-vitro fertilisation.
The current ruling
party, Civic Platform, conceded defeat following the first exit poll,
published by Ipsos moments after polling stations closed at 9pm (8pm
GMT), which gave the national conservative Prawo i Sprawiedliwość
(Law and Justice party) 39.1% of the vote, putting it far ahead of
Civic Platform on 23.4%.
Jarosław Kaczyński,
Law and Justice’s chairman and the twin brother of Poland’s late
president Lech, immediately declared victory. Speaking to supporters
at his party headquarters in central Warsaw, a triumphant Kaczynski
said: “We will not kick those who have fallen... We need to show
that Polish public life can be different.”
If the polling is
confirmed, the result would give Law and Justice 242 seats in the
460-member lower house of parliament, meaning the party could govern
alone and that its lead candidate, 52-year-old Beata Szydło, is
likely to be appointed prime minister.
Distrustful of
Germany and the EU, Law and Justice wants more sovereign control and
believes a strong Nato hand is required to deal with Russia. The
party promises more welfare spending, a lower retirement age and new
taxes on foreign banks.
Szydło has also
campaigned against the EU forcing member states to accept a set
number of refugees from the Middle East and north Africa.
The British prime
minister, David Cameron, has in the past expressed support for Law
and Justice and has included his Conservative party in the same
European parliamentary grouping, but the Polish shift to the right
may not necessarily be supportive of his efforts to renegotiate
Britain’s relationship with the EU.
Two million Poles
working abroad – including an estimated 700,000 in Britain –
depend on the freedom of movement the EU allows. Polish
Euroscepticism is also different from the British variety. It feeds
to some degree on frustrations over sovereign influence and the
economic dominance of neighbouring Germany, but for the large part it
is linked to the country’s conservative family values and worry
over gender politics and perceived secularist trends that are seen as
undermining the influence of the Catholic church.
One Warsaw voter,
Małgorzata Cyganik, a 37-year-old translator, said she was afraid
the election would lead to individual freedoms being curtailed. “The
ideology that is coming into Polish politics [with Law and Justice]
is frightening,” she said.
“People are voting
to protect what they see as the things that are special about Poland
and that are threatened by the outside, but with that may come a big
step backwards.”
Lucas Miszczyk, a
48-year-old sound technician, took the opposite view, saying he felt
Law and Justice was the only party that has Polish interests at
heart. “If you look at Warsaw, you see only foreign shops, banks
and brands – C&A, Bank Millennium, H&M, Carrefour. Where
have all the Polish businesses gone? We have opened our doors too
much and we have lost control of our own economy. We must say stop.”
Poland’s economy
is expected to grow by 3.5% this year and next, and unemployment
recently fell below 10%. Voters, however, have responded favourably
to introspective rhetoric and claims that secular and gender politics
in the EU, and the multi-ethnicity of western Europe, are a threat to
traditional Catholic values and national sovereignty.
The governing Civic
Platform has never recovered from a 2014 eavesdropping scandal that
discredited high-profile government ministers.
The Polish
electorate is also faced with a left wing that has failed to rebuild
itself since the end of communism. It remains a messy mix of greens,
socialists, radicals and post-communists who fell short of the 8% of
the vote needed to enter parliament.
After voting in the
Saska Kępa district of Warsaw, the United Left leader, Barbara
Nowacka, said she hoped the election would mark a breakthrough for
small parties such as hers. “It looks like Law and Justice will
win, but what is even clearer to me is that voters in Poland want
change. You see this because of the way voters are capable of moving
from one small party to another. They are looking for a credible
system change.”
Law and Justice said
Szydło would be its prime minister if it formed a government, but
the party is also strongly associated with the controversial former
prime minister Jarosław Kaczyński.
He won political
capital during the campaign by playing up fears linked to Europe’s
migration crisis. He claimed refugees were bringing “cholera to the
Greek islands, dysentery to Vienna, various types of parasites”.
Civic Platform has fought to keep Poland’s refugee quota down,
finally agreeing to take just short of 7,000 refugees.
Law and Justice last
held power from 2005 to 2007, when Kaczyński governed in tandem with
his twin brother, the late president Lech Kaczyński, who died in a
plane crash in Smolensk, western Russia, in 2010.
Their time in power
was marked by internal political turmoil triggered by their combative
style and international tensions brought about by their anti-German
and anti-Russian views. Since his brother’s death, Kaczyński has
hinted several times that he believes the plane crash was Russia’s
work.
“If Law and
Justice end up governing alone with an allied president, Poland will
become another Hungary,” said Prof Radosław Markowski of the
Polish Academy of Sciences, a reference to the extremist rightwing
views of the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
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