Polish Political Parties Have No American Match

This weekend, Poland elected the "right-wing" Law and Justice Party to lead their parliament, giving them 39.1% of the vote. The electoral results are very clear, and they tell us that Poland is moving in a similar political fashion to it's Eastern European neighbors right now.

WARSAW — Poland’s main right-wing opposition party, out of power for nearly a decade, came roaring back in parliamentary elections Sunday, with a platform mixing calls for higher wages with appeals to traditional Catholic values.

Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz, speaking to supporters, conceded defeat. Official exit polls, released immediately after voting ended Sunday evening, showed the right-wing party, Law and Justice, drawing 39.1 percent of the vote, trouncing Civic Platform, the center-right party that has governed since 2007, which got 23.4 percent.

In an especially telling result, highlighting how Poland was joining many regional neighbors in a shift to the right, it appeared that none of the country’s left-wing parties would qualify for seats in Parliament for the first time in Poland’s post-communist history.

Indeed, the Polish left wiped out in these elections. Defining right and left in Polish politics is difficult when compared with American politics. Law and Justice's Platform is interesting, to say the least.

Distrustful of Germany and the EU, Law and Justice wants more sovereign control and believes a strong Nato hand is required to deal with Russia. The party promises more welfare spending, a lower retirement age and new taxes on foreign banks.

Szydło has also campaigned against the EU forcing member states to accept a set number of refugees from the Middle East and north Africa.

The British prime minister, David Cameron, has in the past expressed support for Law and Justice and has included his Conservative party in the same European parliamentary grouping, but the Polish shift to the right may not necessarily be supportive of his efforts to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU.

Two million Poles working abroad – including an estimated 700,000 in Britain – depend on the freedom of movement the EU allows. Polish Euroscepticism is also different from the British variety. It feeds to some degree on frustrations over sovereign influence and the economic dominance of neighbouring Germany, but for the large part it is linked to the country’s conservative family values and worry over gender politics and perceived secularist trends that are seen as undermining the influence of the Catholic church.

This is indeed a brand of politics that mixes old-left protectionism and government spending with right-wing xenophobia, nationalism, and conservative religious values. It's an odd mix only in the American political mind, where hyper-patriotism is usually mixed with conservative social positions and pro-corporate policies.

There is a scary element to this. A scan through people tweeting about this election on Twitter found some strange elements celebrating. German Nazi types that deny the Holocaust, Eastern European anti-government types, and hard-line American right-wingers were tweeting favorably about this. There's not much that binds those groups together, other than all interpreting this as favorable for wildly different reasons. It will be fairly fascinating to see how this all works in practice, now that Law and Justice will actually have to govern, and whether or not Poland will take a serious step backwards or continue to grow economically. Poland had been a success story, politically, for some time now. That may be about to change.