Brussels, 26/10/2015 (Agence Europe) - The victory of the Conservative PiS (Law and Justice) party in the parliamentary elections in Poland, on Sunday 25 October, came as a surprise to no one. However, its scale and the poor showing of the Civic Platform party, which has led the country for the last eight years, has allowed it to resurface with triumph and has given it renewed confidence to apply its programme based on defending the national interest and opposing any form of federalisation or joining the eurozone.
According to results which have not yet been confirmed, 37.7% of the electorate voted for PiS and 23.6% for the party of the outgoing Prime Minister, Ewa Kopacz. If the result is confirmed, the victorious party will be able to govern alone, a first since 1989. The job will be particularly easy as the new Polish President, Andrzej Duda, who took up his duties in early August, was elected with the support of PiS.
This party was founded by the Kaczynski twin brothers. One of these, Lech, died in 2010 in an aeroplane crash in Russia when he was President. The other, Jaroslaw, has remained the central figure who, due to his unpopularity, put forward a woman, Beata Szydlo, as candidate for the post of Prime Minister. Often presented as an ultra-conservative, nationalist verging on xenophobic party, PiS has nonetheless not pledged to overturn the policies applied by the Polish government under Kopacz or, before her, Donald Tusk, currently the President of the European Council.
Defending the national interest has indeed always been a constant in Polish politics. This approach could be stepped up even further, as shown by the political manifesto of PiS. What the EU may expect from the new government is not a rejection of European integration, but a desire to exploit it to the benefit of the “Polish state, which is the supreme value”. “We look at the EU through the prism of Polish interests”, which is a “perspective which convinces us that the EU's greatest assets are the single market, the freedom of movement of persons, goods, capital and services, freedom and equality, common rights and duties and, within a framework of this kind, the principles of solidarity and mutual assistance which guarantee that all states remain sovereign and retain their own models of development in line with their own national interests”, reads the manifesto of the incoming Polish government for the next four years (our translation). (Jan Kordys)