Poland will hold its general election on October 15, Polish President Andrzej Duda confirmed Tuesday.
“The future of Poland is a matter for each of us! Use your rights,” Duda said on social media, announcing the election date.
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s ruling nationalist Law and Justice party (PiS) currently leads the center-right Civic Coalition by 6 percentage points according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.
POLAND NATIONAL PARLIAMENT ELECTION POLL OF POLLS
For more polling data from across Europe visit POLITICO Poll of Polls.
PiS, which took power in 2015, is trying for an unprecedented third term in power.
The party has overseen growing conflicts with the European Union thanks to its radical changes to the legal system, which EU institutions have said erodes their independence and puts courts under political control. As a result, Brussels has frozen the disbursement of around €36 billion in pandemic recovery funds.
Despite those clashes with Brussels, the country has seen a dramatic improvement in its international standing thanks to its support for Ukraine after last year’s invasion; Poland is now one of the highest defense spenders in NATO — aiming to reach 4 percent of GDP this year.
The opposition is framing the election as the last chance to restore rule of law in the country and to hold PiS and its allies accountable for a series of corruption scandals.
“They want to put a collar and a muzzle on you!” said Donald Tusk, the leader of Civic Coalition and a former prime minister as well as president of the European Council, shortly before Duda’s announcement.
The ruling party, backed by state-controlled media that act as its propaganda arm, have targeted Tusk for months, warning Poles that a vote for him is a vote for German influence over Poland.
“Tusk equals Germany. I think that in his entire political life Mr. Tusk has done more good for Germany than for Poland,” Morawiecki said last month.
The government even created a special commission to investigate Russian influence on Polish politics, a move seen as being aimed at Tusk as his government — in power from 2007-2015, signed natural gas deals with Russia. The commission led to an outcry from the U.S. and the EU, forcing Duda, a PiS ally, to water down the legislation; it went into effect on Tuesday.
The opposition in turn warns that PiS is close to Russia’s Vladimir Putin thanks to its anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and its erosion of democratic standards.
While the PiS government has inflamed passions thanks to its takeover of the courts and its tightening of abortion laws, which saw thousands of women take to the streets in protest, the country is enjoying faster economic growth than in most other EU countries and has a very low unemployment rate.
The outcome of the election is very close.
Although polls show that PiS is unlikely to win an outright majority in the 460-member lower house of parliament, it could look for support from the far-right Confederation party, which is seeing a surge of support among younger voters.
The main opposition parties are running separately thanks to personal differences among the leaders, although they have vowed to work together to remove PiS from power.
This article has been updated.