Polish Eurosceptic Conservatives Win Parliamentary Election

But it is clear that Poland’s 2015 Parliamentary elections have given the Law and Justice party led by Jarosław Kaczynski a thumping victory, with up to 40 per cent of the vote. “Relations with Russian Federation won’t get better, but it’s not Poland’s fault”. The Law and Justice party has strong support in Poland’s rural areas for this reason, which in part contributed to the usurpation of the centrist Civic Platform. This means that the party will not be able to change laws as easily as Orbán’s Fidesz party has been able to do, because Poland, like Hungary, requires a two-thirds parliamentary majority for constitutional changes.

A few party members indicate that the new government could be in place by mid-November.

Cienski offers his view, saying: “Poland’s outgoing government was reluctant to take in migrants, and ended up doing so only under fierce pressure, while refusing to accept the idea of mandatory quotas to resettle them. The party will most likely have an outright majority”, said Kazimierz Kik, a political scientist at the Jan Kochanowski University in the city of Kielce.

The PiS chief has also sided with leaders of ex-East Bloc states who have criticized the EU’s handling of the Middle East refugee crisis, according to Reuters.

After this election, increased tension with Brussels and EU partners seems inevitable, because the ruling party will also be bound to compromise its domestic policy agenda because of European policy-making. Indeed, the party has increasingly given the impression that, with the Eurozone’s huge internal problems, it could not envisage any point in the foreseeable future when it would be advantageous for Poland to adopt the single currency.

Kaczynski, a former prime minister, leads the party but has tapped Beata Szydlo, 52, to be the PiS’s choice for prime minister.

A more active eastern policy?

Under the Civic Platform party, Poland’s output grew fivefold since the end of the Cold War.

This time, the party took a new tack.

A woman walks past a damaged Civic Platform election poster in Warsaw on Monday. With the escalating migration crisis in Europe, Poles rather went for the semi-populist PiS.

But although the European Union member’s economy is forecast to expand by 3.5 percent this year and next, and joblessness recently fell below 10 percent, many voters are fed up, believing time and money have been wasted.

A pricklier relationship with Germany?

“We want, probably as of January 2016, to introduce two taxes that are important for us, including a tax on banks – it will be a tax on assets with a rate of 0.39 percent – and a tax on supermarkets”, he said.

“We will exert law but there will be no taking of revenge”.

It has cited examples of European Union states with large Muslim communities where it claims that such a scenario is already unfolding. In short, Civil Platform can not be accused of kowtowing to Brussels.

Yet Law and Justice has to admit that Poland has done very well out of the EU.

More Eurosceptic in rhetoric than practice?

Although the issue of Polish-EU relations has been highly contested in recent years these divisions were often not about the substance of the European integration project as such. While the country’s energy mix will be evolving to include a bigger share of renewables, the pace of change will need to be adjusted to the geographic, political and economic conditions, according to Law & Justice.

While PiS are often described as eurosceptics, they are not likely to advocate leaving the EU. It is worth bearing in mind that when it was last in government in 2005-7 the party’s rhetorical inter-governmentalism often gave way to a more integrationist approach in practice – for example, signing Poland up to the Lisbon treaty – and that it has never opposed Polish adoption of the euro in principle. Experience, therefore, suggests that a Law and Justice government would probably be more Eurosceptic in its rhetoric than in practice.