Poland’s Conservatives Score
Impressive Victory
By Robert Strybel
Warsaw Correspondent
Poland’s governing conservative Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość or PiS) won the recent European Parliament election by garnering 45.38 percent of the vote which enabled them to send 27 lawmakers to the European assembly based in Strasbourg, France. With a parliamentary majority of 234 seats, PiS is a pro-family, pro-Catholic and pro-patriotic party that believes the European Union should be a bloc of sovereign homelands concentrating on economic convergence among its 28 member nations. According to many Polish voters, PiS owes its third consecutive election victory to being one of very few parties anywhere that actually keeps its campaign promises.
Its arch-rival, the European Coalition (Koalicja Europejska or KE) won 38.5 percent of the vote and sent 22 members to the European Parliament. The core of the KE was the liberal-centrist Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska or PO) party with 133 seats in the present Polish parliament. Fearing total failure in its unending bid to remove PiS from power, its boss Grzegorz Schetyna slapped together an incongruous coalition of moderate liberals, progressive anticlericals, post-communists, greens and conservative agrarians and rebadged it the European Coalition. Its defeat was all the more humiliating since the contest had boiled down to PiS vs all the rest.
In lieu of a developed political platform, PO and its KE allies have pursued an endless PiS-bashing campaign. Many voters remember the PO as the party which rarely keeps campaign pledges and has had a string of high-level scams to its name. But its clientele includes many big-city dwellers, white-collar types, showbiz celebrities and assorted elitists and snobs who look down on the rank-and-file Poles whose dignity, sense of self-worth and eocxnomic status PiS has worked hard to upgrade.
The only other grouping that made it and is sending three lawmakers to the EP is the openly pro-LGBT, anti-Catholic Wiosna (Spring) party of declared homosexual Robert Biedroń. As a novelty on Poland’s political scene, earlier this year Wiosna skyrocketed to 16 percent support in public-opinion surveys, but ultimately attracted only six percent of the vote, just above the five-percent threshold required to win seats,
Since all Polish parties mobilized their electorates to go out and vote in this year’s crucial ballot, Poland registered its highest turnout ever for an EP election – 35.4 percent. Conservative and populist parties such as Poland’s Law and Justice fared better than ever before across the continent and succeeded in breaking the political stranglehold on the European Union’s legislature which leftists and nominal Christian Democrats had held for decades. But the monopolists plan to expand their coalition to include one or more additional parties to ensure their continued dominance.
Also in America, more PolAms than ever before voted in the EP election and, true to form, most Polonians threw their support behind PiS. In Chicago, 3,713 votes were cast for PiS and only 650 for KE.
At present, there seems to be agreement on only one point – that the recent EP ballot was essentially a dress rehearsal for Poland’s key parliamentary elections expected to take place this autumn. They will decide whether Poland’s “Good Change” government can continue its efforts to build a strong, sovereign and prosperous Poland for all its citizens.
The alternative would be a victory for liberals and leftists who tend to support foreign-interest groups and have pledged to disband the government’s anti-corruption bureau, the communist-crime-tracing National Remembrance Institute and even Polish public TV. Those pledges alone seem to show that the self-declared “total opposition” is catering primarily to foreign-owned TV networks, former communist secret-police agents and law-bending scamsters, backed by an array of actual and wannabe elitists.
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