A victory for Law and Justice could exacerbate tensions between Poland and the EU, raising concerns about issues related to media independence and the rights of women and migrants.
– We have ceded some of our power to the EU, but now that is enough, nothing more. We are members of the EU and want to remain so, but in an EU of independent states, party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski said in a closing campaign speech on Friday.
A vote for the EU
The largest opposition group, the centrist Citizens’ Coalition, is led by former prime minister and EU chief Donald Tusk. At his closing meeting, he accused Law and Justice of having a “secret plan” to leave the EU, and that the government is taking the country down the wrong path. A vote for the opposition is a vote for Poland to remain part of the EU community, Tusk said.
– This is the most important day in the history of our democracy since 1989, Tusk said, referring to the year when the communist regime fell.
The West and Ukraine also fear that Poland will follow the same path as Slovakia, which recently held elections. The winner, Robert Fico, has been likened to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who defies the rest of the EU by having a close relationship with Russia. During the election campaign, Fico promised, among other things, that NATO country Slovakia will not send “a single bullet” to Ukraine.
Conflict with Ukraine
Since Russia launched its war of aggression against Ukraine last year, Slovakia has, in terms of GDP, been one of the countries in Europe that sent the most support to the war-torn country. Poland has also been one of Ukraine’s foremost champions and, among other things, received a million refugees from the country, but now the population seems to have started to tire. Poland has also clashed with Ukraine over the grain trade, where import bans have been imposed to protect Polish farmers.
29 million Poles are eligible to vote, of which half a million live abroad.