Polish Legislative Elections: Very Tense Fight Between Kaczynski And Tusk

On Sunday, October 15, Poland’s 29 million eligible voters, of whom half a million are registered abroad, were called to the polls to elect 460 members of parliament (Sejm in Polish) and 100 senators. The election campaign, which European newspaper Politico described as “apocalyptic,” has drawn attention to the tug-of-war between Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Law and Justice (PiS) party, now in power, and the Civic Platform party led by Donald Tusk, former Prime Minister of Poland and former President of the European Council.

According to the latest opinion polls, Kaczynski’s “populist” party has a slight lead and risks facing serious difficulties in forming a coalition government, thereby opening the way for Tusk’s opposition. The PiS party currently controls 226 seats in parliament.

A PiS victory could sharply escalate tensions between Warsaw and Brussels. Both Kaczynski and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki criticized the European Union’s migration policies and called for a “significant reduction” in aid to Ukraine. For its part, the EU expressed concern about Poland’s internal policies regarding the “controversial” reform of the judicial system and the protection of certain rights (of women, migrants, and the press).

Tusk’s Civic Platform hopes to achieve a draw with PiS and try to forge an alliance with the Third Way, a liberal coalition that, however, risks not even getting 8% of the vote, the threshold needed to enter parliament. “This is the most important day in our democratic history since 1989,” Tusk said, according to whom the Polish people must vote “so that Poland, which is the heart of Europe, remains in the European Union.”