Poland has a new Prime-minister - Turning to the right!

[Jaga]

Change to the right in Poland. We will have a new prime-minister, another woman, but on the right. Prawo and Sprawiedliwosc (Peace and Justice) won comfortable majority seats in the parliament. German mass media talk about "orbanization" (referring to Hungarian prime-minister Orban).

Here is from Washington Post:

www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/latest-polish-voters-look-to-small-groups-to-left-and-right/2015/10/25/4e264070-7b00-11e5-a808-b79edfe51797_story.html

Poland’s expected PM: Will stay close to the people



By Associated Press October 25 at 6:28 PM
WARSAW, Poland — The latest news as Poles vote in a parliamentary election. All times local:

11:20 p.m.

Polish lawmaker Beata Szydlo says she will be the country’s next prime minister if official results confirm an exit poll showing a decisive win for her conservative Law and Justice party.

The 58-year-old Szydlo ran as the party’s candidate, but there had been speculation that party chairman Jaroslaw Kaczynski might end up taking that job for himself.

An exit poll shows that Law and Justice took 39 percent of the vote Sunday, which would translate into a comfortable majority of 242 votes in the 460-seat lower house of parliament. Official results are expected Monday.

[Jaga]

Two new political forces will be entering Poland’s next parliament, according to an exit poll: a group led by a nationalist right-wing rock star, Pawel Kukiz, and a pro-business party led by an economist, Ryszard Petru.

The poll says Kukiz won 9 percent of the vote Sunday. If the results are confirmed, it would translate to 44 seats in the 460-seat lower house of parliament. Kukiz is an anti-establishment figure who attracted many frustrated with the status quo.

Petru’s party, Modern Poland, won 7 percent and would get 22 seats. He took some votes away from Civic Platform, a pro-business party that governed for eight years but lost Sunday’s election amid voter disillusionment with scandals.

An energetic professional who used to work at the World Bank, Petru appealed to young urban Poles. Among his proposals is a lower flat tax of 16 percent on personal income, corporations and as a sales tax.

[Jaga]

Here is more about the election with the picture of the ex-prime minister Ewa Kopacz:


WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland took a decisive turn to the right in its parliamentary election Sunday, tossing out the centrist party that had governed for eight years for a socially conservative and Euroskeptic party that wants to keep migrants out and spend more on Poland's own poor.

An exit poll showed the conservative Law and Justice party winning 39 percent of the vote, enough to govern alone without forming a coalition.

The ruling pro-European Civic Platform party received 23 percent of the vote, according to the exit poll that prompted Polish Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz of Civic Platform to concede.

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

"We will exert law but there will be no taking of revenge. There will be no squaring of personal accounts," he said. "There will be no kicking of those who have fallen of their own fault and very rightly so."

Kaczynski credited his late brother, former Polish President Lech Kaczynski, with the party's strong showing. His brother was killed in the 2010 air crash in Russia that claimed the lives of the president and many of Poland's top leaders.

If the exit poll results are confirmed, the Law and Justice will take 242 seats in the 460-seat lower house of parliament and 58-year-old lawmaker Beata Szydlo will become Poland's next prime minister. Civic Platform will get 133 seats and only three other parties will make it into parliament — two of them for the first time.

Law and Justice is strongly pro-NATO but also more skeptical of the 28-nation European Union, of which Poland is a member. The party opposes adopting the euro currency and is strongly anti-migrant, positions that are expected to have a broader impact on the whole EU.

The Civic Platform party was seen as falling out of touch with what was happening in Poland and with ordinary voters. In her victory speech, Szydlo promised to not let that happen.

"We are the same as our countrymen, we have not detached ourselves from reality," she said. "We must always remember that we are serving."

The Catholic Church was seen as backing Law and Justice, as were many Poles who have not benefited from the country's strong economic growth, expected at 3.5 percent this year.

Law and Justice has promised to reverse an unpopular rise in the retirement age and put more money into the pockets of struggling families with tax breaks, monthly cash bonuses for children under 18 and free medication for people over 75. It also wants to raise taxes on the mostly foreign-owned banks and big supermarkets in Poland and give tax breaks to smaller local businesses and those that adopt Polish technologies.

For the first time in Poland's post-communist history, no left-wing forces appeared to have won enough votes Sunday to enter into parliament, according to the Ipsos exit poll.

It showed that only five parties gained enough votes to make it into parliament: Law and Justice; the centrist Civic Platform; a right-wing party led by rock star Pawel Kukiz; the new pro-business party Modern Poland led by a former World Bank economist and the Polish Peasants Party.

Two left-wing forces had been in the running: the United Left, a coalition of several parties, and a new party, Together.

Civic Platform had led Poland through a period of strong economic growth and political stability, even during the global financial crisis of 2008-09 and the 2010 plane crash that killed so many top Polish officials. But the presidential vote in May signaled problems for Civic Platform when Law and Justice candidate Andrzej Duda edged out their incumbent.

Having the backing of the Catholic Church has led to some fears that Law and Justice will try to ban in vitro fertilization and create a total ban on abortion.

For now, abortion in Poland is only allowed in rare cases, such as when the mother's life is at risk or the fetus is damaged.

[Jaga]

Here is the old and new prime-ministers: Mrs. Kopacz and Mrs. Szydlo:



Don't they look similar with their short hair?

[pieter]

Dear Jaga/Karl/Nicotshek/Kai, John and Jeanne,

This is democracy at work. The past twenty years center-right, leftwing, rightwing, center-left, center right (the PO-PSL government) and now PiS again have ruled. It is the will of the people, the voters have spoken. We Polish diapora and people with interest in Poland from abroad can be critical about it, but it is how the Poles feel.
In my opinion PiS is rightwing to center-right in the social-cultural, ethnical and national level. In the Dutch media the party is called a Nationalist-conservative party with Populistic elements in it. And that is ofcourse coloured with a Dutch, Western-European glasses on. It is clear to me that a conservative influence of the Polish Roman-Catholic clergy in the churches must have had some influence. Ofcourse most PO members, voters and politicians are Roman-Catholics too, but maybe slightly less conservative and Polish socialist as PiS. Because in the financial-economical sense PiS is socialist like Unia Pracy, SDPL (Socjaldemokracja Polska) and the larger Democratic Left Alliance (Polish: Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej, SLD).

Law and Justice



Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość), abbreviated to PiS, is a national-conservative political party in Poland. With 138 seats in the Sejm and 30 in the Senate, it is currently the second-largest party in the Polish parliament.

The party was founded in 2001 by the Kaczyński twins, Lech and Jarosław. It was formed from part of the Solidarity Electoral Action (AWS), with the Christian democratic Centre Agreement forming the new party's core. The party won the 2005 election, while Lech Kaczyński won the presidency. Jarosław served as Prime Minister, before calling elections in 2007, in which the party came second to Civic Platform (PO). Several leading members, including Lech Kaczyński, died in a plane crash in 2010.


Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński

The party programme is dominated by the Kaczyńskis' conservative and law and order agenda. It has embraced economic interventionism, while maintaining a socially conservative stance that in 2005 moved towards the Catholic Church; the party's Catholic-nationalist wing split off in 2011 to form United Poland. The party is mildly eurosceptic.

PiS is a member of the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists (AECR) European political party. The current sixteen PiS MEPs sit in the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in the European Parliament.


Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński

Ideology



Initially the party was broadly pro-market, although less so than the Civic Platform. It has adopted the social market economy rhetoric of western European Christian democratic parties. In the 2005 election, the party shifted to the protectionist left on economics. As Prime Minister, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz was more economically liberal than the Kaczyńskis, advocating a position closer to Civic Platform. However, unlike Civic Platform, whose emphasis is the economy, Law and Justice's focus is fighting corruption.

On foreign policy, PiS is Atlanticist and less supportive of European integration than Civic Platform. The party is soft eurosceptic, and opposes a federal Europe. In its campaigns, it emphasises that the European Union should 'benefit Poland and not the other way around'. It is a member of the anti-federalist Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists, having previously been a part of the Alliance for Europe of the Nations and, before that, the European People's Party.

PiS Economy

The party supports a state-guaranteed minimum social safety net and state intervention in the economy within market economy bounds. During the election campaign it proposed tax decrease to two personal tax rates (18% and 32%) and tax rebates related to the number of children in a family, as well as a reduction of the VAT rate (while keeping a variation between individual types of VAT rates). 18% and 32% tax rates were eventually implemented. Also: a continuation of privatisation with the exclusion of several dozen state companies deemed to be of strategic importance for the country. PiS opposes cutting social welfare spending, and also proposed the introduction of a system of state-guaranteed housing loans (also unimplemented[citation needed]).

PiS on Social issues

The party's views on social issues are broadly similar to those of conservative parties in other European countries. It favors restrictions on abortion, which is already illegal except in extraordinary circumstances. It is also against euthanasia. It opposes same-sex marriages or any other form of legal recognition of homosexual couples. The PiS are highly critical of sex and violence in the media.

PiS promotes itself as a pro-family party. Prior to elections, it promised to build 3 million inexpensive housing units as a way to help young couples get married. Once in government, it pushed through legislations lengthening maternal leaves and offered qualified support to the idea of giving parents a grant for every newly-born child. It favors shutting down large supermarkets on Sundays and holidays, so their workers can spend more time with their families.

While PiS presents itself as a champion of the Catholic Church, its policies do not always align with the Church's teaching. It has also shown some flexibility in such matters as in vitro fertilization and stem cell research.

Comment:
My (Pieter) worry is that the new PiS government will be a potential danger to the Polish financial and economical succes of the past decade and that to large government spending on social programs will harm the Polish position on the European and world markets.

We are more secular in the Netherlands, but if you look at the Dutch polls the far right Populist PVV party of Geert Wilders has 20.1 percent of the votes (31 seats in parliament), the largest center right party and government party, the conservative-liberal (PO like) VVD has 17.9 percent of the votes (28 seats in paliament), the center-right social-conservative Christian-Democrats of the CDA 12.1 percent of the votes (18 seats in parliament), the christian-fundamentalist Calvinist Protestant SGP has 3 percent of the votes (4 seats in parliament) and 50PLUS, a Pensioners' interests political party in the Netherlands; which gains 3.8 percent in the polls (5 seats in parliament). And therefor the right has a majority of 56.8 in parliament.

The left and center left gains 42.4 percent of the votes:
The Social-DemocraticDutch Labour Party (PvdA) (A government party in coalition with the center right VVD: 8.7 percent of the votes, which means 13 seats in parliament. This is a historical low, when you consider that the PvdA (Labour party) always was as large as the PVV and VVD now. They have dropped dramatically.
The center-left pragmatic liberal D66: With 14 percent of the votes the pragmatic liberal and partly center-left libertarian party this once small centrist party gaines the most votes of the leftwing parties in these polls. It will have 21 seats in parliament.
The Socialist SP: the Socialists with their leftwing populist and traditional leftwing social-democratic propaganda, excellent party machine and campaigns took a lot of votes away from Labour (PvdA) and the GreenLeft party. But even these leftwing populists saw and see a loss in votes to the rightwing populist PVV party of Geert Wilders. The SP has 8.4 percent of the votes which is 13 seats in parliament. (Thus Labour and the Leftwing Patriotic SP are equally big in the polls)
The christian-democratic, social-christian (Biblical) ChristianUnion: 4 percent of the votes which means 6 seats in parliament.
The Leftwing liberal and partly socialist and Green ecological GreenLeft party: Has 5.8 percent of the votes which means 8 seats in parliament.

The situation for the left is less dramatic than in Poland, but the right, center-right and centrist parties are stronger. The left has no power in parliament, nor in the provincial and local councils. There is a rightwing climate, and even within some left parties you see, conservative, populist, anti-migrant tendencies. Especially with some local SP (Socialist) and Labour party politicians and organisations. We point at Eastern-Europe and Central-Europe and say, see those Nationalistic, religious, xenophobe Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Greeks. But look at Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, France, Italy, Austria and Switzerland. Nationalists, rightwing populists, xenophobes and others disguise themselves in so called reasonable national-patriotic, conservative parties. They are the same as the former far right, but today moderate Rightwing Populists (with Social-democratic, Christian-Democratic, Liberal-conservative FDP/VVD roots) merge with the old and new far right. This new phenomenon of the respected rightwing populists cooperating with the far right neo-nazi and hooligan elements is a new development in Germany (and other countries too).

Cheers,
Pieter

[pieter]

www.euronews.com/2015/10/26/poland-s-eurosceptic-law-and-justice-party-wins-election/

www.theguardian.com/world/video/2015/oct/26/poland-rightwing-law-justice-party-election-victory-video

www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34634327

uk.reuters.com/article/2015/10/26/uk-poland-election-idUKKCN0SJ00H20151026

www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/europe/90335-151026-analysis-the-brother-the-ghost-and-the-victory

edition.cnn.com/2015/10/26/europe/poland-election/index.html

I couldn't find any report, article or news about the Polish elections on Fox news.

[Jaga]

Pieter,

I just hope that the Mrs. Szydlo would not become very dependent on Kaczynski.

+++Comment:
My (Pieter) worry is that the new PiS government will be a potential danger to the Polish financial and economical succes of the past decade and that to large government spending on social programs will harm the Polish position on the European and world markets.
+++

I agree, lowering retirement age does not make any sense. People live longer lives, they want to be involved.

[pieter]

Oct 26, 2015 10:33:30 GMT -7 Jaga said:

Pieter,

I just hope that the Mrs. Szydlo would not become very dependent on Kaczynski.

+++Comment:
My (Pieter) worry is that the new PiS government will be a potential danger to the Polish financial and economical succes of the past decade and that to large government spending on social programs will harm the Polish position on the European and world markets.
+++

I agree, lowering retirement age does not make any sense. People live longer lives, they want to be involved.

Jaga,

We agree on these two points and maybe on more subjects?

Cheers,
Pieter

[Jaga]

Pieter,

we definitively agree on more points than just two. I noticed that Poles regularly vote AGAINST the party which forms government every 4-8 years. So, they are fed up in what is going on and the only chance they see is in complete change

Here is election summary from Robert Strybel:

Conservative Law and Justice back in power
By Robert Strybel, Warsaw Correspondent

WARSAW–The conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party in alliance with two small right-wing groupings has become the first poltical formation since the demise of communist rule in 1989 to be able to rule independently. It achieved the basic majority needed to form a government without coalition partners by winning 235 mandates in the 460-seat Sejm (lower house). Its less decisive victory in 2005 had forced Jarosław Kaczyński's party to team up with two none-too-compatible smaller parties and ultimately fall from power in snap elections two years later. (PiS is the abbreviation of “Prawo i Sprawiedliwość” – Polish for Law and Justice.)

Official election results showed PiS winning 37.58% of the vote ahead of its chief rival, the Civic Platform (PO) with 24.09 support. Two small new groupings, the anti-system Kukiz-15 party of rock musician Paweł Kukiz (8.81%) and Nowoczesna (Modern) of hard-nosed pro-market economist Ryszard Petru (7.6%) have made their parliamentary début. And the Peasant Party (Stronnictwo Ludowe – 5.13%), which just barely cleared the 5% threshold, also made it into parliament.

The better-to-do, better-educated urban classes, which had been the mainstay of the middle-of-the-road PO, became fed up with eight years of their party's rule marked by scandals, unkept promises and the same old, tired faces on the TV news. For the first time ever, PiS has not only attracted a higher percentage of young people, city-dwellers and voters with higher education than PO but has actually reversed the results of the Partitions! So far the poorer eastern and southern regions roughly coinciding with the former the Russian and Austrian partitions had been PiS' main base of support. This time only two voivodships (provinces) in northwestern Poland, part of the former German lands ceded to Poland by the Big Three Allies, supported PO, while PiS won the remaining 14. Also for the first time since 1989 the Sejm is free of post-communist hangovers from the long defunct communist regime and other leftists. That means, among other things, that parliament will not be hearing perennial leftist calls for same-sex marriage, abortion on demand or banning religious instruction from schools any time soon.

Law and Justice is opposed to such social experimentation and believes in traditonal family values, Polish patriotism and Christian ideals. That includes more welfare spending on the disadvantaged. PiS has pledged to restore the previous retirement age of 65 for men and 60 for women which the PO-led government had raised to 67. To encourage child-bearing, the PiS benefit package will include a 500-złoty (about $130) monthly family allowance for the second and every subsequent child. To help finance its welfare spending, PiS wants heretofore privileged foreign banks and chain stores to start paying their fair share of taxes in Poland.
On the international front, the victorious ruling camp opposes excessive interference in Poland's internal affairs by European Union bureaucrats and longs for a voluntary union of sovereign nations, not a “United States of Europe”, ruled from the EU's Brussels headquarters. But PiS advocates a strong NATO alliance in dealings with Moscow and a special relationship between Warsaw and Washington in the realm of security. Since Poland's energy grid is mainly fueled by coal-fired powerplants, Warsaw opposes the EU's tougher climate-change legislation. It also opposes a large-scale Muslim refugee invasion which could lead to the terrorist infiltration of Poland.
Although overall European public opinion is now shifting in a more right-leaning, conservative direction, Western Europe's mainstream media, as in America, are still controlled by liberal-leftist elites. It's no wonder then that the PiS victory was none-too-enthusiastically received by many mainline newspapers and broadcasters. Law and Justice has been described with terms regarded in those circles as pejorative such as “nationalist”, “xenophobic”, “pro-Catholic”, “homophobic” and “Euro-skeptical”.
Ultimately, Poland's democratically elected parliament is not primarily there to appeal or cater to the political preferences of foreign leaders, journalists or pundits but to serve the Polish people. It is solely up to Polish voters to assess how well their lawmakers did the next time they visit a polling station.

[pieter]

I think it is the same in many countries Jaga. In the Netherlands leftwing coalition governments often were replaced with rightwing coalition governments, and center-right coalition governments with rightwing coalition governments, like we had with our previous government which was a strange alliance (a very uneasy one) between the conservative-liberal VVD, the Christian-democratic CDA and the PVV of Geert Wilders. VVD-CDA ruled with the support of Geert Wilders. That didn't work, because that rightwing populist didn't let it work with his far right demands and rightwing populism.

The VVD and CDA were and are decent center-right, centrist, democratic parties, and a lot of the Christian-democratic supporters hated the collaboration with the xenophobic PVV of Geert Wilders. Former christian-democratic resistance fighters, politicians and members with a christian social ideology of compassion, empathy and solidarity as important elements, hated the collaboration with Geert Wilders PVV. On the rightwing side some VVD members, employers and businessmen hated the leftwing economical agenda of the VVD (like the Polish PiS, which is rightwing in social-cultural, foreign and relgious matters, but leftwing in it's political policies). And also people from the leftwing of the VVD, and moderate liberals also hated to collaboration with Geert Wilders party. So that coalition of the right collapsed. And the very unusual and uneasy center-right/center-left government coalition VVD-PvdA came into existance. This present government has fierce opposition from leftwing socialists of the leftwing of the Dutch Labour (PvdA) party who hate the Labour cooperation with the rightwing VVD, and from rightwing VVD supporters who hate the collaboration of the VVD in the VVD-PvdA (Dutch Labour) with the social-democratic Labour party. These people favour a government of VVD plus CDA plus the moderate market oriented center left D66 party, because such a coalition would serve business interests, economical growth, cut backs, working on a low state debt and less spending.

Poland and the Netherlands are not the same, but in both countries the rightwing parties are stronger. The difference is that in the Netherlands the left is stil in parliament and in Poland the left is not represented in parliament. I wonder what the PO will do in opposition, and how the new PiS government will work. Will the foreign relations with Germany deteriorate? Will Poland focus more on the Visgrad group. Will there be a Polish-Hungarian alliance? Will Slovakia be part of that alliance in the Visgrad perspective? How will the relations be within the Weimar Triangle (Germany, France and Poland)? How will the Polish position in the European Union be? Will Poland focus more on the Polish-American Transatlantic relationship? How will the Polish-Israeli and the Polish-Palestinian relationship be in that perspective? Seen the anti-immigration and anti-Muslim climate in Poland and Central- and Eastern-Europe in general, maybe the Polish-Palestinian and Polish-Arab relations will be less good for a while? What financial-economical policies will the new PiS lead government have? Will education, Research and Development, modernization, Human Capital, innovation and the pleasent Moderate/pragmatic course of the previous PO government be continued, or will we have a rightwing socialist government. Roman-Catholic and Polish Nationalistic/Patriotic conservative in social, cultural, political and military matters and socialist in social-economical, financial and health care matters?

There are differences between Geert Wilders PVV and Kaczynski's PiS, but there are a lot of similarities also. Both for instance are rightwing nationalistic in the cultural and national matters and socialist leftwing on social-economic, social security and healthcare matters.

Cheers,
Pieter

[pieter]

Poland's democratically elected parliament is not primarily there to appeal or cater to the political preferences of foreign leaders, journalists or pundits but to serve the Polish people. It is solely up to Polish voters to assess how well their lawmakers did the next time they visit a polling station.

Exactly. PiS might not be my favority party, or yours, or of the Dutch, German and French journalists, but it is the Polish people who have voted. And now we will see what PiS will make of it with it's coalition partners.

[pieter]

Although overall European public opinion is now shifting in a more right-leaning, conservative direction, Western Europe's mainstream media, as in America, are still controlled by liberal-leftist elites. It's no wonder then that the PiS victory was none-too-enthusiastically received by many mainline newspapers and broadcasters. Law and Justice has been described with terms regarded in those circles as pejorative such as “nationalist”, “xenophobic”, “pro-Catholic”, “homophobic” and “Euro-skeptical”. Ultimately, Poland's democratically elected parliament is not primarily there to appeal or cater to the political preferences of foreign leaders, journalists or pundits but to serve the Polish people. It is solely up to Polish voters to assess how well their lawmakers did the next time they visit a polling station.

Dear Jaga,

That is true, the best journalists in Western-Europe are often leftwing or center-left leftwing intellectuals with an university background, political activist past, and long experience in liberal radio programs, tv news shows, newspapers, magazines and news blogs and websites. It is up to the right to be better organised, trained, educated, skilled and prepared to built rightwing and center-right media. In the Netherlands the largest newspaper and magazine are rightwing, the Telegraaf en Elsevier. There are rightwing-intellectuals in Western-Europe too, and rightwing media like Fox chanal in the USA are being developed or founded in Europe too. But is stays a fact that the schools of journalism and journalists are often leftist, leftwing or progressive liberal.

In my view Prawo i Sprawiedliwość is “nationalist”, “xenophobic”, “pro-Catholic”, “homophobic” and “Euro-skeptical”, but it is one sided to only mention these elements of their program without saying things about their social agenda, internal affairs, foreign affairs, health care and eduction policies, what they achieved the last couple of years in opposition towards the PO, that they managed to make the left (SLD/ the United Left) irrelevant due to their socialist economical program and the fact that they attracted so many different kind of polish voters.

Cheers,
Pieter