Change in leadership: What’s at stake in Poland’s fall election?

The election campaign in Poland has unofficially been in full swing for months. The leaders of both the ruling right-wing populist Law and Justice (PiS) party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and the liberal, pro-European Civic Platform (PO), Donald Tusk, have been criss-crossing the country, trying to mobilise their supporters and win over swing voters. Now, however, things have got a lot more serious. On Wednesday, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda finally fired the starting pistol for the official election campaign when he announced that the country would go to the polls on October 15.

While Duda’s announcement came before the deadline set out in the constitution, the opposition is of the opinion that the government gave itself an unfair advantage by making the announcement so late in the day.

The reason for this is that all the recent events at which representatives of the government praised both itself and its policies to the skies — such as the “family picnic” that marked the signing of a law to increase child benefit — were paid for out of the national budget, a source of funding the opposition is unable to tap into.

Now that the election campaign is officially underway, every political party has to pay for its own events and account for every Zloty spent.

Despite the head start, the race for government has not begun well for the ruling party: On Tuesday, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki was forced to dismiss his health minister, Adam Niedzielski. The minister was deemed by many to have violated both medical confidentiality and data protection rules by revealing on Twitter that a doctor who had criticized Niedzielski had prescribed psychotropic drugs for himself. The dismissal was a major blow to the ruling party, which expected Niedzielski to play a key role in its election campaign. The hope is now that his successor, 37-year-old lawmaker and doctor Katarzyna Sojka, will pick up the pieces and, as a woman, burnish the party’s image.

Given that the ruling party has few economic and social successes to shout about, Kaczynski is once again relying on anti-European and anti-German sentiment to get PiS re-elected. In an interview with right-wing Polish magazine Sieci, Kaczynski called Tusk an “envoy of the Brussels bureaucracy,” which he said is heavily dominated by Germany and is using increasingly brutal means to subordinate Poland. He also said that Tusk is a “Brussels bureaucrat controlled by Berlin.” He had previously warned that a Tusk victory would mean the “end of Poland.”

In its attempts to keep anti-German sentiment alive in Poland, the government’s propaganda machine pounces on every critical comment about Poland that is made in Germany — appearing not to shy away from a degree of manipulation in the process. Its most recent target was German politician Manfred Weber, who also happens to be the president of the transnational centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), the largest party in the European Parliament.

Speaking to German television recently, Weber described Poland’s ruling PiS as an “opponent.” Pro-government media in Poland translated the word as “enemy” and launched a stinging attack. “A strike against Poland” ran the headline in the Catholic daily newspaper Nasz Dziennik.

In addition to Poland’s relations with Germany, security policy is a major campaign theme for Kaczynski. On Tuesday, the Polish government will get a chance to bolster the image of its armed forces. August 15 is a national holiday in Poland, the day on which the country commemorates its victory over Soviet Russia in 1920.

This article was provided by Deutsche Welle