Monday, 22 October 2007

Good news from Poland

Poland's centre-right Civic Platform party appears to have won enough seats to lead a coalition following the country's General Election. This is good news, as it spells defeat for the governing, conservative Law and Justice Party, whose policies are bad news for Poland and the EU. The media are exaggerating when they call Civic Platform "Poland's 'liberal' opposition party", but they are still much better than Law and Justice. It will be interesting to see how Poland's Democratic Party, social liberals who sit with us in the European Parliament, have done, once all the votes are counted.
Posted by Matthew Harris at 13:31

5 comments:

  1. Tristan22 October 2007 at 16:01

    They may well be liberal, especially considering the wide range of views that liberal now covers from classical liberalism to near socialist policies with some calling Thatcherite economic freedom and social conservatism and nationalism liberal...

    It seems they have a liberal stance on the economy but a conservative stance on social policy.
    The former is welcome, the latter not welcome and its more likely to lead to general liberalism than the other way round (where the problems caused by economic illiberalism cause division and strife and a backlash against other freedoms as scape-goats)

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  2. Edis22 October 2007 at 17:34

    I think the 'Democrats' fough this election as part of a coalition called LiD (Lewica i Demokraci, which means 'Left and Democrats')

    LiD seems to have about 13% of the vote, about 52 seats in the lower house. How many of those are 'Democrats' havent a clue.

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  3. Anonymous22 October 2007 at 17:36

    Civic Platform is partly formed by a splinter group from the Freedom Union, the liberal party the remains of which joined Democratic Party – demokraci.pl. So both have liberal roots, and are both partly liberal. Pity that the factions within the Freedom Union couldn't agree on power sharing. As the remains of the Freedom Union were represented in ELDR, Civic Platformed seeked European friends elsewhere. But I hope they will somedary return to the European liberal family.

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  4. Dominik30 October 2007 at 06:05

    The Law and Justice Party (PiS) may have made some mistakes, but in general, they want good for Poland. PiS are Catholic, so that is beneficial for Poles. Some have said recently that PiS have been bad to the EU, but the truth is that the EU have been bad to Poland. PiS only wanted to cooperate with the EU on things that would benefit Poland.

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  5. Matthew Harris30 October 2007 at 22:22

    Thanks, Dominik, I think we shall have to agree to disagree. I'm not saying that everything done by Law and Justice was wrong, but I do think that Civic Platform's government will be a considerable improvement on its predecessor. We shall just have to see how Mr Tusk turns out now that he is in office.

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