Page 28 - BNE_magazine_11_2019

28 I Central Europe bne November 2019
PiS chairman Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
It’s four more years of Law and Justice
in Poland but what’s next?
Wojciech Kosc in Warsaw
The question everybody is asking themselves ahead of Sunday’s general election in Poland is not who will win it but how big the ruling populists’ margin of victory will be.
Polls give the incumbent Law and Justice (PiS) a near-certain majority in the lower house of the Polish parliament, the Sejm. The outlook for the Senate is
a bit cloudier but still to PiS’ advantage. So what is next for Poland?
Should PiS win a majority in both houses again, a likely outcome is a further tightening of its political grip over Poland and more conflict with Brussels. At least that is what one can infer from the rhetoric that came to the fore in the last weeks of the campaign – although it has been clearly present since PiS won the previous election in 2015.
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“We will go down a very different road to that which used to be the road of pseudo elites that once managed to gain control over Poland,” said PiS’ chairman Jaroslaw Kaczynski at a campaign rally in Sosnowiec.
“The new Polish power elite and I hope that the greater part of the cultural elite and other elites, no longer work for our enemies,” he added.
On course, on track
Barring a totally unexpected turn of events in the run up to the vote or if the polls are completely amiss – both rather unlikely developments – PiS is about to get four more years to carry out its revolution in Poland. A revolution that the ruling party likes to describe as pandering to those who feel they have been marginalised by the transition from the communist era.
And that is not just by the generous social transfers the party promised and delivered – although the “they keep their promises” factor is strong with PiS’ consistently strong showing in the polls. It also is by offering a sizeable part of Polish society pride in their country, which PiS says has been hitherto disparaged by the liberal and leftie elites that want nothing less than the destruction of the traditional values of Polish society.
“We want to build a Polish version of the welfare state,” Kaczynski said in Sosnowiec.
Voters appear to want that as well. PiS has consistently polled at 40% of the vote at least in a number of polls carried out several weeks before the election. Politico Europe’s poll of polls gives Kaczynski’s party 47% on average. Just