News that Jaroslav Kaczynski and his Law and Justice (PiS) party have been returned to power in Poland will not go down well in most EU capitals. Budapest, and perhaps London, apart. Hungary's Prime Minister Victor Orbán will find in the return of the conservative Catholic, nationalist movement a welcome kindred soul, and in Kaczynski in particular an abrasive and fearless eurosceptic ally, willing to take on all that emanates from Brussels and with the same authoritarian instincts. "Putinism with a Polish face", is how some despairing Poles are describing it.
Neither men could be described as “communautaire”. And both are deeply hostile to the resettling of refugees fleeing war in the Middle East and Africa . Kaczynski this month warned that migrants from the Middle East could bring unknown diseases and parasites to Poland and has echoed bishops’s concerns about the dilution of the country’s Christian ethos. Yet Poland has been the biggest beneficiary of fellow EU members’ hospitality to their own citizens some two million of whom have migrated around the EU.
Kaczynski, who will probably opt not return to the prime ministership, is nevertheless likely to be the power behind the throne of his protege Beata Szydlo.
The PiS’s successs after eight years out of power is attributable to concerns about austerity and a mix of disillusionment with centrist Civic Platform (PO), increasingly exhausted, perceived as arrogant, and embroiled in scandal,
The party’s brand of right wing populsim is likely to propel it quickly into conflict with the EU mainstream and not only on refugees. It favours a sharp rise in public spending, promises to increase state control of the economy, tax banks and stop privatisation . Its budget plans and ideas for the central bank – a cheap lending programme worth €82 billion over six years to support growth – are not likely to be compatible with EU fiscal rules or the requirement for central bank independence.
After the Portuguese and Polish elections Europe’s establishment should take note – a new political balance is emerging. It is time, perhaps for a policy rethink.