Are Polish voters ready for change?
Classified Polnews
Polish voters are continually subjected to news of threats of new elections in Poland. In spite of the turmoil created by Poland’s Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski in his quest to create the Fourth Republic of Poland, support for his political party indicates that even if there are new elections there will be very little change in the makeup of the Polish parliament. Are Polish voters ready for change or will they stand behind Kaczynski?
Poland
The leader of the political party League of Polish Families, Roman Giertych, does not think that there will be very much change were there new elections. In fact, he says that new elections in Poland would be a joke.
See New Polish elections a joke according to Deputy Prime Minister
Current election polls show that the opposition party Civic Platform has a higher support level among the people polled. But going into last elections higher support levels for Civic Platform in the election polls did not result in a victory for the Civic Platform.
In the last elections in Poland, however, there were people who voted for Kaczynski and his Law and Justice Party with the assumption that they would go into coalition with the Civic Platform. Many of these people expressed' disappointment after Kaczynski did not go forward with a coalition with the civic platform. It is possible that these people would shift their vote to the Civic Platform this time.
But Kaczynski appeals to the people who feel left out by the changes that resulted in the transformation from a centrally planned economy to a more open economy. And his approach so far has been to attack the people who support the open economy even to the point of almost stopping privatization and proposing the reversal of privatization of some firms. What he has been doing is playing to the feelings of these people.
Against this backdrop, Civic Platform has provided little reason to vote for them other than to imply that Kaczynski is bad for the country.
So when it comes time for people to actually cast their vote, will they once again return Kaczynski to power when he is telling them the things that they want to hear or will they vote against Kaczynski because they think he is bad for the country.
In that most people vote emotionally rather than voting based on reason, it may be the populist proposals of the Law and Justice Party and Kaczynski will prevail. They may not be ready to change.
