Polish far right eyes role as kingmaker after this year’s elections

Apr 2, 2023 | Politics

By Daniel Tilles

Poland’s mainstream opposition has this week belatedly woken up to a reality that has long been apparent: that the far right may hold the balance of power after this autumn’s elections, and would therefore play a large role in deciding who – if anyone – can form a government.

Polling has long indicated the strong possibility that neither the current ruling camp – centred around the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party – nor the main opposition – in which the centrist Civic Platform (PO) is the primary force – will win the 231 seats in the lower-house Sejm needed to hold a majority.

Estimates at the start of March by Ben Stanley, a Warsaw-based political scientist, had PiS winning 207 seats while the combined centre-right, centrist and left-wing opposition had 228. That left the far-right Condeferation (Konfederacja) and its predicted 24 MPs as a potential kingmaker.

Since then, Confederation has risen further in the polls, from around 7% support in February to 9-10% now. That has seen it overtake The Left (Lewica) and Poland 2050 (Polska 2050) to become the third most popular party behind PiS and PO.

Monthly average support in polls for Poland’s main political groups, including Confederation in black (source: ewybory.eu)

Confederation’s polling numbers have in fact been rising since November, coinciding with a conscious attempt by the party to change its approach and soften its image.

Last year, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Confederation focused much of its efforts on criticising the generous support being given by Poland to the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian refugees, suggesting that those resources should be used to help Poles.

That tactic backfired, however, amid overwhelming support from Polish society for Ukraine and the refugees. Confederation fell from polling figures of around 9% at the start of 2022 to 6% by the autumn. In September, a protest against the “Ukrainainisation of Poland” organised by a Confederation activist famously attracted not a single participant.

That led to a clear change of tack by the grouping, which sidelined two of its leaders – Janusz Korwin-Mikke and Grzegorz Braun – who were most associated with anti-Ukrainian rhetoric and other extremist positions.

In October, Korwin-Mikke – an 80-year-old veteran libertarian who has been a permanent feature of Polish politics since the fall of communism – stepped down as leader of his eponymous KORWiN party, one of the constituent members of Confederation, which is an alliance of nationalists and right-wing libertarians.

He was replaced by Sławomir Mentzen, a 35-year-old businessman and activist. Shortly afterwards, the party dropped Korwin-Mikke’s name and became known as New Hope (Nowa Nadzieja).

Since then, Confederation has visibly avoided talking about Ukraine and Russia. At the launch of its election campaign in February, neither country was mentioned by the main speakers, Mentzen and Krzysztof Bosak, another young leader from the nationalist side of the alliance.

Instead, the group has focused in particular on its free-market rhetoric, something that sets it apart from Poland’s other main political forces. “Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell,” said Bosak in his speech at the convention.

Mentzen, meanwhile, has become a star on TikTok, where he is the most followed Polish politician, with over 700,000 followers for his videos that regularly attack the economic policies of both PiS and PO.

Until now, the approach of both PiS and the main opposition parties has been largely to ignore Confederation. However, with its support in polls beginning to reach double figures, the opposition has begun to react.

In particular, they and their supporters have sought to show that the far right – and Mentzen in particular – are trying to hide their radical views by presenting themselves simply as proponents of free-market economics.

They have noted, for example, that ahead of the 2019 European elections, Mentzem declared that Confederation’s five-point programme was: “We don’t want Jews, homosexuals, abortion, taxes and the EU.”

Mentzen argues that those words were taken out of context, and that he had simply been giving a theoretical example of what kind of rhetoric gets through to voters. “These were never my views,” he now says.

Last week also saw renewed attention to a website published by Mentzen in 2019  ahead of parliamentary elections containing 100 bills that he said he wanted to become law.

Among them were the introduction of 10-year prison sentences for performing an abortion, the creation of “undissolvable marriages” for those who wanted them, legalising corporal punishment of children by parents and other carers, and ending Poland’s ban on promoting fascism and using hate speech.

Mentzen has this week tried to brush off the significance of the bills. In an interview with Radio Zet, he described them as “prehistoric..a project from four years ago, I was not even the author of most of these bills”.

“I am [now] trying to get through to voters with a message of low and simple taxes but people want to talk about something that is no longer present at all in my message,” he said.

In a further interview with website Wirtualna Polska, Mentzen added that he “doesn’t remember many of the bills” but confirmed that he supports corporal punishment, wants abortion to be an punishable, and favours abolishing rules limiting free speech, including the promotion of totalitarian ideologies.

While the opposition has sought to undermine Confederation, PiS has continued its policy of ignoring it. However, this week a senior figure from one of PiS’s coalition partners, the hard-right United Poland (Solidarna Polska), expressed warm words towards Mentzen, Bosak and the idea of an alliance with the far right.

“I have always said there are no enemies on the right; I have always been open to cooperation with Confederation,” Janusz Kowalski, who is a deputy agriculture minister, told Radio Plus. “There are many very good politicians there. I respect Krzysztof Bosak very much.”

Kowalski even went as far as to issue an appeal to urban voters, saying that if they do not want to vote for the ruling camp, then it would be better for them to vote for Confederation than for centrist or left-wing opposition parties.

“Voting for eurosceptics, eurorealists who think like United Poland on many issues is good for Poland,” he said.

In another interview with Onet, Kowalski said that, if his party and PiS do not win a majority, then forming a government with Confederation “is possible”. He also said that having Menzten as finance minister would be “a good experiment”.

While Kowalski certainly does not speak for the ruling coalition as a whole – and indeed his party and PiS have often been in conflict – his words indicate the reality that, if neither of Poland’s two main political groups wins a majority this autumn, the current ruling camp would be more likely to seek some kind of accommodation with Confederation than would the opposition.

While that could take the form of an alliance, it could alternatively involve PiS trying to tempt enough individual MPs from Confederation (and possibly from the centre-right opposition) to defect to the ruling camp to get it above 231 seats for a majority in parliament.

For its part, Confederation – which regularly attacks both PiS and PO with equal vigour – maintains that it does not want a coalition with either.

“Currently, the most likely scenario is a joint [PiS-PO] government against us,” claimed Mentzen this week. “Our aim is to consign PO and PiS to history and their leaders to retirement.”

Main image credit: Dawid Zuchowicz / Agencja Gazeta

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