Poland welcomes right-wing election successes in Italy and Sweden

Leading figures from Poland’s ruling camp, including Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, have welcomed the electoral success of right-wing and far-right parties in Italy yesterday, as well as in Sweden’s recent election.

Immediately after exit polls last night predicted a victory for the Brothers of Italy (FdI) party – which sits in the same European grouping as Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party – Morawiecki tweeted congratulations to Giorgia Meloni, FdI’s leader and the likely new Italian prime minister.

Earlier on Sunday, with FdI predicted to win the election, Morawiecki had declared himself “happy that a tremor is running through the EU”, reported the Polish Press Agency (PAP).

With the likely new governments in Italy and Sweden – where the nationalist Sweden Democrats are now the second largest party – “watching the interests of nation-states…Europe is becoming a Europe of real values”, said Morawiecki.

PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński had also declared Sunday to be “a day of hope, hope that the EU will start to change”, reports news website wPolityce.

Morawiecki’s predecessor as prime minister, Beata Szydło, who is now a PiS MEP, also tweeted congratulations to Meloni and FdI in Polish, English and Italian. Polish deputy foreign minister Paweł Jabłoński hailed FdI’s “historic victory”.

Deputy justice minister Michał Wójcik, who belongs to PiS’s hard-right junior coalition partner United Poland (Solidarna Polska), said that Meloni’s victory was a “defeat for [European Commission President Ursula] von der Leyen, the representative of the anti-democratic forces in the EU”.

“Abnormality in the EU is ending,” declared Wójcik. “The rule of manipulators and lunatics in the European Commission is slowly coming to an end.”

Figures from Poland’s ruling camp had criticised von der Leyen in recent days for suggesting that the EU would use “tools” against Italy, as it had with Hungary and Poland, “if things go in a difficult direction”.

Another United Poland figure, MEP Patryk Jaki, also hailed “Italians [for] not allowing themselves to be blackmailed by the EU” and achieving “a great victory for the right”.

The Polish government’s response was, however, criticised by opposition MP Agnieszka Pomaska. “The elections in Italy are won by…the post-fascist Meloni, the pro-Russian [Matteo] Salvini and the discredited Berlusconi,” she tweeted. “And the United Right [Polish ruling coalition] crows with delight.”

Both PiS and FdI are part of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party (ECR), which seeks reform of the EU in the direction of a looser union of sovereign member states and opposes further integration.

In recent years, PiS has also sought to forge closer links with Salvini’s Lega party, as well as other right-wing and far-right forces in the EU, such as France’s Marine Le Pen.

However, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine such efforts have been put on hold, publicly at least, given that those parties’ generally sympathetic position towards the Kremlin is at odds with PiS’s strongly anti-Russian line.

Main image credit: Santi_ABASCAL/Twitter

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.