“Poland will be best place to live in Europe,” pledges prime minister

The government’s new economic programme will make Poland the best place to live in Europe, the prime minister has pledged. Mateusz Morawiecki also hailed the fact that many Polish emigrants have already chosen to return to their homeland.

Speaking on Friday, Morawiecki outlined the progress made in the first 100 days since his government launched the “Polish Deal”, its flagship tax-and-spending package designed to boost recovery from the pandemic (and, commentators say, provide a platform for possible early elections).

“Thanks to the Polish Deal, Poland is to become the best place to live in Europe,” said the prime minister, quoted by Interia. “Our goal is for it to be a country in which the aspirations of Poles can be fulfilled.”

“I am so glad that in the last two years between 150,000 and 200,000 people have returned to Poland,” he continued. “People often come up to me and say: ‘Prime Minister, I came back with my family from Ireland, England, Germany.'”

While Morawiecki said that he had statistics on the number of returns, the latest published official data are from 2018. In that year, the estimated number of Poles living abroad fell by 85,000.

Anecdotal evidence indicates that significant numbers of Poles have been returning since then, especially in the wake of Brexit. The number of Poles living in the UK has declined in recent years (though not all who have left have returned to Poland).

The prime minister outlined ten steps that had been taken so far to implement the new deal. These include a tax reform, approved by the government last week, that will purportedly benefit almost 18 million Poles, mostly low earners and pensioners.

“This will leave [an extra] 16.5 billion zloty (€3.6 billion) in the wallets of Poles,” claimed Moracki, who called it “one of the largest tax cuts in Poland’s history”.

Critics of the Polish Deal – including a junior coalition partner that left government over the issue – claim that it will hit businesses and millions of Poles with higher taxes.

Other elements highlighted by Morawiecki include lifting financing limits on visits to specialist doctors at the start of July; a plan to pay parents up to 12,000 zloty for their second and each subsequent child; and state-guaranteed housing loans for families.

Poland’s economy has grown rapidly in recent years. Last year, the country overtook Portugal in terms of GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, having previously passed Greece. It is predicted to move past Italy within the next decade, reports Money.pl.

In the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index, which takes account of health, education and income, Poland currently ranks 35th (and 24th in Europe). That is a rise of only one place since 2015, when the current government came to power.

Main image credit: Krystian Maj/KPRM (under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.