Still unclear if Law and Justice can govern Poland alone

WARSAW, Poland (AP) – Official results from Poland’s parliamentary election confirm that the right-wing Law and Justice party took more votes than any other group.

That story, however, did not resonate throughout Poland, which remains very rural, very religious and, in its more remote corners, still crippled by the transition from the Communist regime that ended a quarter-century ago and untouched by the country’s wider economic success.

The results must still be confirmed but it appeared that Law and Justice has a chance to form a majority government.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Law and Justice, promised his party would govern fairly.

But the win is not a complete fulfilment of Kaczynski’s ambitions.

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

If the exit poll is correct, the victory by PiS would be the biggest in terms of seats by a single party since Poland held free elections after shedding communism in 1989 – marking a decisive swing to its brand of social conservatism mixed with left-leaning economics in the country of 38 million people.

“We are not xenophobic and inhospitable, but wise and educated”, Archbishop Piotr Libera said in a sermon.

The Polish constitution states that the National Bank of Poland – the central bank – is responsible for the stability of the Polish currency.

The latest exit poll by IPSOS, gave PiS 37.7 percent of the vote, translating to 232 seats in the 460-member lower house of parliament.

At the same time, the outgoing government came under growing pressure – both domestically from the liberal-left media and cultural establishment, and internationally from Brussels and other European Union states – to play a greater role in helping to alleviate the crisis by participating in a Europe-wide burden sharing plan.

During the campaign Kaczynski said that migrants could carry unsafe diseases to Europe, words that sparked sharp accusations that he was using language similar to that of Nazi Germany. Increased family benefits, a lower retirement age and lower taxes on small- and medium-sized businesses will add to public borrowing.

“Suspicious of foreign influence and (big) foreign companies, the designated ruling PiS is also more critical of the European Union in general”, Wolf-Fabian Hungerland, an analyst at Germany’s Berenberg bank said Monday. Polish voters were exhausted of the Civic Platform government – even Donald Tusk admitted during a meeting with Polish journalists that it was time for a change.

More broadly, Law and Justice has sought to contrast what it claims is its accurate diagnosis of Russian motives with the Civic Platform-led government’s earlier conciliatory approach towards Russian President Vladimir Putin, which events in Ukraine have shown to be naïve and short-sighted.

Law and Justice’s electorate has been typically made up of older Poles, people in rural areas and those who are less educated and struggling financially.

Szydło, whose father was a miner, will be the country’s third female prime minister, taking the reins from Ewa Kopacz of the Civic Platform party. It is a heavy supporter of the Catholic Church with a ban on abortion and in-vitro fertilisation among its policies.

Although current Pope Francis has urged Catholics to open their homes to refugees from war in the Middle East, a few Polish clerics have said that allowing Muslim migrants to settle in Poland would damage its Christian character.